Layer Cake

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I watched Matthew Vaughn’s Brit gangster movie Layer Cake without so much as looking at the presskit, or in fact knowing that it even was a gangster flick. I note this because the movie immediately reminded me of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch — a meaner, somewhat less stylized Snatch — so it didn’t come as a […]

Lords of Dogtown

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Having quite enough trouble staying upright without putting wheels under me, I freely confess that I have never been on a skateboard in my life. There was an unfortunate incident involving a pair of plastic roller skates when I was about 7, but that was enough to convince me that such pursuits come under the […]

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

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I liked enough things about Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose that I want to give the film higher marks than it deserves — but its flaws run too deep to ignore. The movie starts out as an unusually insightful deconstruction of a bogus Garden of Eden relationship between a father and daughter […]

The Goonies

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This is a relic from that very frightening period when it appeared that Steven Spielberg was simply going to take over the world of film. If he couldn’t make the movie himself, he would produce it or executive produce it and, in the bargain, steamroll the nominal director — be it Tobe Hooper or Barry […]

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

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While there’s nothing exactly — or at least actively — wrong with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, neither is there anything all that right about it. As the title suggests, this movie is pretty much a teenage knock-off of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood — something that I presume extends to the source […]

Cinderella Man

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“When America was on its knees, he brought us to our feet,” claims the tag line for Ron Howard’s Depression-era drama about boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe). Resisting the fact that I know there’s a rude gag in there somewhere, I’ll concede that the claim pretty much sums up the approach Howard takes with Cinderella […]

Madagascar

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Before getting down to the specifics of this inoffensive but thoroughly inessential offering from Dreamworks Animation, I want to make an open plea to filmmakers everywhere: Let’s lay off the Chariots of Fire parodies and quit slapping Louis Armstrong’s recording of “What a Wonderful World” on soundtracks. The first is just no longer funny (if […]

The Longest Yard

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By a happy coincidence, I saw this film the same day I happened to watch Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 pre-Code (read: before the Production Code emasculated movies for 30 years) newspaper melodrama, Five Star Final. The two movies have nothing in common, but there’s a scene in the LeRoy film where newspaperman Ziggie Feinstein outlines his […]

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

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The pity of a movie like this one is that the people most in need of seeing it are the very people who won’t. They’ll brand it as “liberal agenda” propaganda and head off to see Star Wars, where the liberal agenda is washed clean in a sea of severed limbs and falls on ears […]

Look at Me (Comme une Image)

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Yes, this film is French and it’s subtitled. These combined factors are apt to play against Agnes Jaoui’s second film, Look at Me, when it hits town this week, but I find myself asking why this should be. Asheville has a pretty darned savvy set of moviegoers, but from what I’ve seen in the past […]

Plan 9 from Outer Space

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Speaking as the guy who wrote the chapter on Edward D. Wood Jr. for a book entitled The Sleaze Merchants (my work only appears in the classiest tomes, you understand), I’m glad to see Asheville getting a dose of the peculiar delights of Ed Wood-style cinema. And those delights don’t come any more peculiar than […]

Imaginary Heroes

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Imaginary Heroes was the opener at last year’s Asheville Film Festival, where it went down quite well with the audience. The film, which has been in (limited) theatrical release since February, has finally made it back to the area. This is not a great movie, by any means, but it is an always-interesting one — […]

Kicking and Screaming

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The title of this spectacularly unfunny Will Ferrell flick is an apt description of what I felt like doing when I learned I’d be watching it. OK, I admit it — I don’t “get” Will Ferrell. Sure, Elf was a pleasant surprise, and Ferrell deserves a nod for tackling a more serious role in Woody […]

Mindhunters

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No, this is not very good movie. But it’s only fair to point out that those who say they’re outraged about this tricked-out splatter movie being a travesty of the 1939 Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None, seem to have overlooked the fact that Dame Agatha wasn’t being terribly original herself. The novel’s […]

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

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This unusual film is the only movie scheduled for this season of Cinema in the Park, a free “series” of showings in downtown Asheville, and it’s certainly an interesting choice. Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed holds the distinction of being the first feature-length animated film — having preceded Disney’s Snow White and […]

Unleashed

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This movie has made my list of the top 10 most preposterous movies ever made, which isn’t to say that it’s not entertaining, in its way, merely that it’s … well, preposterous. Of course, that’s not entirely unexpected, given that the movie is the work of producer/writer Luc Besson and director Louis Leterrier, who last […]

Time After Time

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Writer Nicholas Meyer’s 1979 directorial debut is probably still his best film. Time after Time boasts a likeably cheeky conceit that’s in the same vein as his novel, The Seven Percent Solution, a clever screenplay and three very strong central performances. Malcolm McDowell stars as H.G. Wells, but not quite the historical Wells, since the […]

Crash

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Writer Paul Haggis’ directorial debut is obviously intended to be an important film, but I’d be much more inclined to accept that it is one if Crash didn’t have “Oscar Bait” written all over it. As with Haggis’ screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, this movie insists on announcing its significance at every turn, to such […]

Dear Frankie

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This unassuming little Scottish film from first-time director Shona Auerbach (who also photographed the movie) played at the unlikely hour of 11 a.m. on a Sunday as an out-of-competition entry at last year’s Asheville Film Festival, and is just now making its limited theatrical rounds. Unfortunately, the fact that it has no big name stars […]

House of Wax

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Sure, any movie that subjects Paris Hilton to a spectacularly gruesome death can’t be all bad. (Call me old-fashioned, but I think “celebrity” status ought to be built on more than having a lot of money and a knack for drawing attention to yourself — mostly in the horizontal position.) All the same, House of […]