How do you review a movie like Doom? Why even bother? Doom is exactly what you think it is — a noisy, gory, silly movie taken from a video game, populated with disposable cardboard characters running around corridors shooting guns and/or being chased and eaten by nasty monsters. You already know whether it’s on your […]
As Word Wars proclaims, the game played in National Scrabble Association tournaments is “not your grandmother’s Scrabble.” And what a shame — according to this fascinating but ultimately unpleasant documentary about cutthroat Scrabble competition, grandmother’s game was a lot more fun. The Scrabble champions in Word Wars, most of them men, are unlikable, obsessive fanatics […]
I saw The Fog, a singularly pointless remake of John Carpenter’s fairly enjoyable 1980 ghost story, with one friend who can best be described in this context as a “jumper.” That’s to say that he’s an easy mark for a shock effect. Even the slightest such attempt will normally have him nearly leaping from his […]
The first thing you encounter in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown is a narration by Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) that discusses the difference between a failure and a fiasco — the idea being that anyone can fail, but that it takes a special type of person to create a fiasco. If that’s so, then Crowe himself is […]
About a week ago, I changed the water in my aquarium. What a fool I was! I realize now I could have sold the thing to Tony Scott to shoot his next movie through. At least, I could have if he plans on making his next film look anything like Domino, which appears to have […]
Straight off: This film is not for the squeamish or those with tender sensibilities. That said, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is anything but gratuitously violent (see Domino for that), but it is most assuredly violent. And Cronenberg being Cronenberg, he doesn’t flinch from it, or prettify it — nor does he revel in […]
If I’m a little less enthusiastic about Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit than many of my fellow reviewers, chalk it up to my having difficulty with the grotesqueness of the human characters (I’m OK with Gromit the dog and the various and sundry rabbits) in this claymation work from Nick Park and […]
I was watching a documentary on Ken Russell’s The Devils the other day, wherein British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies remarked, “People say he’s got bad taste. Well, yes, he does — and thank God for it!” What has this got to do with first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick’s Waiting …? Simply that McKittrick strives for […]
Two for the Money is perhaps the most seriously deranged movie of the season — possibly of several seasons. Apart from the three lead performances, the movie is bad in the train-wreck sense. And that’s also what makes it fascinating. Yes, a little while back, I applauded Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm for refusing to […]
The Gospel has its eyes on being a surprise hit a la Diary of a Mad Black Woman, but it lacks that film’s low comedy and Tyler Perry’s fan-base. For that matter, it also lacks the overheated melodramatics of its target, though it understands the religiosity all too well — even if one might question […]
This is one of those cult items that I’ve never “gotten,” and trying it again for this review didn’t change that. I think this is one of those Generation X things that requires the viewer to have grown up on Sesame Street (or worse, Fraggle Rock) to appreciate. For someone whose only childhood exposure to […]
With so much cinematic junk flooding theaters, it’s a relief to encounter a movie like Proof, which actually dares to deal with ideas and complex — and complexly motivated — characters. The situation may also cause the movie to be overrated. That was certainly the case with the previous collaboration between director John Madden and […]
It’s called a “chick flick,” what 60 years ago was called a “woman’s picture” — aimed at a largely female audience, focused on female characters and likely (though not invariably) directed by a gay filmmaker such as George Cukor, Edmund Goulding or Mitchell Leisen. Not much has changed in the intervening years. I have no […]
Though it’s usually pegged as a documentary, Orson Welles always referred to this engaging, playful movie as an “essay film,” and that’s probably nearer the mark. It’s ostensibly an examination of two of the 20th century’s great fakers — art forger Emyr de Hory and writer Clifford Irving, two men Welles suggests may have become […]
For years this fact-based drama was Japan’s highest grossing film — not unreasonable, if you consider the current popularity, in our country, of March of the Penguins. Antarctica gives you not only penguins, but also sled dogs and Japanese explorers — not to mention a Vangelis score (this last is perhaps a matter of taste). […]
What would you say is the “Greatest Good?” According to the official site of this Forest Service-produced centennial documentary on the history and mission of the Service, “Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.” The […]
Saying that Serenity was a good bit better than I’d been expecting is a little shy of unbridled praise, since I’d been looking forward to this film about as much as one might look forward to cranial surgery. Despite the stoutest of efforts by friends to alter this attitude, I continue to lack the proper […]
As I remarked to my viewing companions upon exiting Roman Polanski’s newest film, “You know, the only thing wrong with it is that it’s Oliver Twist.” (Actually, I had added a descriptive word in front of the title, but my editor would’ve substituted asterisks, so you’d have had to guess at it.) Anyhow, that is […]
I cannot convey how much I did not want to see this movie. I tried to palm it off on my Xpress reviewer-pal Marci Miller. No soap. She claimed she was swamped. My thought at the time was that she merely had better sense than to want to hie herself all the way to Hendersonville […]
Into the Blue isn’t a movie so much as it’s a lame excuse to show Jessica Alba in a variety of skimpy swimming attire. Even before the film gets to the point of “personalizing” its leering approach, the camera leaves little doubt of its primary focus: lingering on scantily clad ladies shown mostly south of […]
Disabuse yourself of the notion that Tim Burton’s latest is going to be on as grand a scale as his earlier animated feature, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and you’ll have a better time with this more intimate, sweetly macabre film. Burtonians will understand when I say Corpse Bride perhaps has more in common […]
