Armed with a cult-favorite comic book, just the right actor to play the title character, and the kind of budget he couldn’t have imagined when making movies like Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro ought to have had a great film right at his fingertips with Hellboy. And maybe he did, but if […]
Remakes are very rarely a good thing — especially those reworkings of movies you love. And in my apparently minority view, films starring Tom Hanks are often not all that much more of a good thing. Combine these factors with the fact that the Coen brothers’ last opus, Intolerable Cruelty, was little more than an […]
Errol Morris’ The Fog of War is a sobering, chastening, riveting work, and one of the most unsettling cinematic experiences imaginable. And that’s not in the least because it was filmed well in advance of our current war; though World War II and Vietnam are actually being discussed, Fog invariably seems to be commenting on […]
Over the years, Robert Altman has given me a vast amount of pleasurable and/or thought-provoking moments at the movies. I’ve liked a lot of his work — and even loved some of it (Brewster McCloud, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A Wedding, Popeye, Short Cuts, Gosford Park). I have also often found him overrated — […]
After I burned out on admiring the gorgeous, slightly sub-Tim Burton production design by Bill Boes (who started out trying to make films look Burtonesque with Monkeybone), and after I got beyond wallowing in cinematographer Oliver Wood’s strikingly saturated colors, I realized I still had about 70 of Scooby Doo 2’s 91 minutes to slog […]
This movie is 82 minutes in length, which is about 80 minutes too long. I didn’t walk out because the opening shot was of miserable, sleazoid drug dealer “King” David (hip-hop artist DMX) in his coffin, since I wanted to make sure the film ended with the same shot after it spiraled through the character’s […]
In one of Kevin Smith’s deliriously subversive Jay and Silent Bob movies, Jay (Jason Mewes) complains that he can’t watch Pretty in Pink with Silent Bob (Smith), because “this tubby bitch cries like a little girl.” Who would have guessed that this was probably not a joke after all, but a very real assessment of […]
Well, here it is mid-March, and the first really brilliant film of 2004 has finally arrived to break the monotony of movie mediocrity that invariably accompanies the new year. There are those people who think screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can do no wrong; for the rest of us — I didn’t like his Adaptation at all, […]
Heretical statement: George A. Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead is a plodding, overlong, absurdly overrated horror flick that made its mark by combining a whole lotta fake blood and entrails with not-very-deep social satire. (Zombies in a shopping mall? How can you tell the difference?) Its success probably had more to do with the […]
Local filmmakers Francine Cavanaugh and Adams Wood bring their 2002 feature documentary to the Fine Arts for one showing to benefit the Asheville Community Resource Center — which, not unlike many of the nonprofit organizations depicted in Boom: The Sound of Eviction, was forced out of its operating location against its wishes. While Boom deals […]
Thank goodness for the 2003 releases that are now making their way into town, since those are about the only things keeping the first part of 2004 truly interesting! It took a while for first-time feature-writer/director Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville to penetrate our environs, but it was worth the wait. So is his […]
Yep, the opening credits to this film — and much of its mood — are an unabashed Se7en rip-off. Too, most — though not all — of its plot contrivances are fairly obvious. And, sure, Angelina Jolie hasn’t been in a good movie in ages (for that matter, I haven’t forgiven Ethan Hawke for Waking […]
I was probably expecting too much. Here I was faced with one of my favorite genres and one of my favorite (perhaps my very favorite) actors working today in a film by a director whose Stir of Echoes impressed me greatly with both its atmosphere and its general understanding of cinematic vocabulary. (You can keep […]
“It’s not as bad as you’d expect,” the movie-theater staffer told me as I went in to see Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London. His prediction turned out to be true: Unlike most sequels, Destination London is better than the first Agent Cody Banks outing. Alas, that isn’t saying much. Sixteen-year-old Seattle sophomore Cody Banks […]
When I opined last week that Starsky and Hutch looked like it was going to be a “broad comedy centering on gay jokes and drug references,” I wasn’t wrong. What I didn’t know was quite how far the movie would take this somewhat limited approach to getting laughs — or just how genial it would […]
Since we live in a world where people think Forrest Gump is a real person and that the events depicted in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre actually happened, it’s probably best to set to rights the incredible fiction that the folks at Disney are trying to pass off as fact in Hidalgo. Oh, yes, there really […]
If you think that Ashley Judd and Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t possibly be in anything more tepid — or boring — than High Crimes and No Good Deed respectively, then you haven’t yet seen Twisted — a shoo-in for worst “thriller” of 2004. You look at the cast and you look at the director, and […]
Prefacing Havana Nights with Dirty Dancing must have been some marketing guru’s idea to make the movie attractive to the teens, who have discovered the 1987 original with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze and turned it into a popular, oldie-but-goody video. Maybe that’s also why the 51-year-old, still-sexy Patrick Swayze was cast in a small, […]
As someone who found Broken Lizard’s first effort, Super Troopers, more painful than funny, I was not predisposed to expect very much from their new film — and, in most respects, I was not disappointed. That’s a pity, because Club Dread starts off as a pretty sharp satire of the slasher movie, ends with what […]
If exit remarks are any barometer, it can truthfully be said that not everybody loves Raymond. The word I most heard in connection with Ray Romano’s big-screen debut was “boring” — and that just about sums up my own feelings. I had never encountered Romano before, so I had no real preconceptions. Now, alas, I […]
As an agnostic with a mystical bent who’s also something of a non-fan of Mel Gibson, I am either the worst — or the best — audience for The Passion of the Christ. After all, if Gibson’s movie were to work on me, then it will have done more than just preach to the choir. […]
