Cold Mountain

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The first question about Cold Mountain on just about everyone’s mind — at least everyone in this part of the world — is whether Romania looks like Western North Carolina. The answer lies in the film’s clear explanation of why Transylvania County was named after Transylvania, Hungary (now part of Romania). Indeed, if you didn’t […]

House Of Sand And Fog

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Here’s a movie with a poignant lesson for us all: Open your damned mail. OK, that sounds glib, but everything that happens in this bloated Lifetime Movie of the Week could have been avoided if its heroine, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), hadn’t spent eight solid months wallowing in such self-pity that she not only couldn’t open […]

Mona Lisa Smile

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It’s more than a little ironic that Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile contains a sequence where its heroine decries the emergence of Van Gogh paint-by-numbers kits, since the movie itself is perhaps the most virulent example of a paint-by-numbers creation imaginable. Despite its amazing female star-power, the film really is nothing more than a switcheroo […]

Love Don’t Cost A Thing

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High on the list of Questions That Need Answering is this puzzler: Who actually thought it necessary to remake an already paper-thin 1987 teen comedy called Can’t Buy Me Love? The original was lightweight enough, and mostly notable as Patrick Dempsey’s big-break film. Though nothing special, it was harmless and agreeable enough, and had the […]

Something’s Gotta Give

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Personally, I liked it a lot better when this was being referred to as Untitled Nancy Meyers Project. That, at least, had some personality, and didn’t plumb the archives to dredge up a title that was once adhered to Marilyn Monroe’s ill-fated final film project. Unfortunately, I also enjoyed this film more as an idea […]

Stuck On You

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A fair amount of negative press surrounds this latest offering from Peter and Bobby Farrelly, with most of it centering around the fact that Stuck on You isn’t as wildly funny as There’s Something About Mary — the yardstick, unfortunately, by which Farrelly Brothers movies are measured. To some extent, this typecasting is the Farrellys’ […]

The Angel Doll

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This charming and unabashedly sentimental holiday film — playing for one show only — was the Audience Award winner at the Asheville Film Festival, where it also placed second for Best Film. It’s easy to see why. The Angel Doll is a well-crafted period movie — set in 1950s North Carolina — about a young […]

Honey

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I knew better than to think this was in any way related to the 1930 Nancy Carroll musical of the same name, even if the prospect of a hip-hop version of “Sing You Sinners” was an amusing fantasy (almost up there with Barbra Streisand’s cover of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” as mind-boggling entertainment). Yet […]

The Last Samurai

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Didn’t Richard Chamberlain already make this as an interminable TV mini-series a number of years ago? Whatever else it does, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai certainly manages the interminable part with great flair. This movie is a full 144 minutes, and I felt every one of them creep by. Actually, this Asianized variant on Dances […]

Bad Santa

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Let me make this clear: I didn’t dislike Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa. That said, I easily could have, since I was one of maybe six people on Earth who was underwhelmed by Zwigoff’s previous film, Ghost World, a movie so smugly hip, it made my head hurt. And Bad Santa is somewhat in this same […]

The Haunted Mansion

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No, it’s no Pirates of the Caribbean (who thought it would be?). But neither is it The Country Bears. The worst that can be said about The Haunted Mansion is that it’s remarkably tepid. The best that can be said is that it’s reasonably harmless and nicely designed. Also, Eddie Murphy isn’t appalling here like […]

The Missing

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Armed with his A Beautiful Mind Oscar, Ron Howard stretches his wings with this attempt at a dark, wholly adult Western. And it is a brave attempt — I just wish I could say that I thought it was also a successful one. The best I can say is that The Missing doesn’t fail the […]

Timeline

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While Timeline is one of the more dismal offerings this holiday season, it does manage to raise enough questions that help make it possible to sit through the film’s seemingly interminable 116 minutes. You may find yourself asking, for starters, “Who in their right mind would make a film like this in a post-Monty Python […]

The Station Agent

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Is actor-turned-writer/director Thomas McCarthy’s debut work, The Station Agent, really as good as has been said? Probably not, though it is a good-hearted film that makes some keen — and pertinent — comments on the human condition. It’s also remarkably well-made, turning its obvious paucity of budget into a plus. I’ve heard a lot of […]

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat

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Not long ago, in a West wood called HollyLived a producer named Grazer, whose taste was sheer folly.He took a short children’s tale about a creature, the Grinch,Then enlarged much upon it, mindless of stench.It mattered to him not, if all charm were shorn ‘way,Since all Grazer wanted were audiences who’d pay.And pay, yes, they […]

Gothika

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While Gothika isn’t nearly as scary as The Cat in the Hat, it’s considerably funnier. (If only these two movies could just swap places!) Being funny is not, of course, the typical goal in a horror thriller — though that doesn’t mean the results can’t be entertaining. Such is the case with Gothika, as silly […]

Shattered Glass

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I started watching Shattered Glass, the directorial debut from writer Billy Ray (Hart’s War), knowing the basic story: that New Republic writer Stephen Glass had been caught with his sources down, and was then fired in disgrace for either wholly fabricating (or at least mildly cooking) many of his articles for the magazine. I finished […]

Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World

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It takes a brave soul to make a straight-faced movie in 2003 with old-fashioned, seafaring-adventure dialogue, where the commanding officers are always starting sentences with, “Come on, lads!” or some such bewhiskered variant. It helps, in the case of Master and Commander, that such nautical camaraderie is channeled through Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey […]

Tupac: Resurrection

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I know it will come as a great shock to many (especially those who grew up on the mean streets of Fairview), but I’m not an unreserved admirer of rap. And ownership of Sean (then “Puff Daddy”) Combs’ “Come With Me” CD single “featuring Jimmy Page” doesn’t quite buy me an encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop, […]

An insider’s view of the AFF

Feeling every inch the stowaway, as I always do at events like the Grove Park Inn’s Nov. 6 gala opening for the first Asheville Film Festival, I’d hardly processed the concept before I found myself — as a film-festival judge — being interviewed by WLOS TV’s John Le. And before I could fully process that, […]