Let me put this in perspective with a perfect “break-out” quote that the studio is more than welcome to attach to its advertising : Made me wish I was watching The Country Bears again! It’s loud, stupid and tedious. And if director Rob Cohen had his way, it would have been even louder. The film […]
With a Friend Like Harry has lined itself up for no less than nine nominations for France’s Cesar Awards and is a contender for Britain’s BAFTA award for Best Foreign film. The film and writer-director Dominik Moll are being likened to Hitchcock. The advertising heralds it as “the thriller that electrified Europe.” But is With […]
Someone needs to break it to Nicolas Cage that World War II is over. First it was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and now it’s Windtalkers. And while Windtalkers has several things going for it that Captain Corelli didn’t — mostly in the dynamic directorial panache of John Woo — it’s ultimately just another war picture tarted-up […]
I was once awakened from a sound sleep, told there was a mouse in the kitchen and asked what should be done. “Name it Julius,” I helpfully suggested and went back to sleep. I relate this anecdote solely to illustrate that in general, I am not alarmed by rodentia. Over the years, I have even […]
Oleander is a pretty flowering shrub seen everywhere around Los Angeles. It’ s also deadly poisonous. Imagine white oleander, magnificent in its seeming purity, placed in a sunshine-lit glass brimming with white milk. The metaphor is abundantly clear-it is mother’s milk itself that is a deadly poison. A child weaned on this milk is born […]
It’s a shame that the big-bucks marketing guys for What’s the Worst That Could Happen? didn’t decide on a different title. Though based on the wonderful Donald E. Westlake novel of the same name, a movie with such an unwieldy title is the kiss of death at the box office. A real pity because, except […]
What Lies Beneath is a ghost story for adults. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford. It is Robert Zemeckis’ latest big-budget blockbuster. It is summer, and you have two hours worth of free time burning a hole in your pocket. This is as good a way as any to spend those hours. Now, I’m […]
They ought to have merely called it What a Princess Diaries Girl Wants and been done with it. No, it’s not unwatchably awful. And if you’re a girl — or a dreadfully romantic boy — between the ages of 11 and 15, it’s probably even pretty good, and you’re less likely to be distracted by […]
Dealing from an incredibly stacked deck, writer/director Randall Wallace brings us what is, in essence, the first pro-Vietnam War movie since the days of The Green Berets — only he doesn’t. Well, not exactly. By setting the film in the earlier days of the conflict — before anyone had had much chance to question things […]
First off, I have to say that this movie is unregenerately bad, while still being occasionally pretty funny — and very occasionally very funny. The screenplay is by a couple of fellows calling themselves Brent Briscoe and Mark Fauser (hopefully they were wise enough not to give their right names), previously the authors of something […]
I have a personal litmus test for movies. Basically, it consists of this concept: Any movie that makes me wish I was sitting through the entire original three-hour-and-50 minute cut of Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara is in the direst of trouble. Rare is the film that achieves this dubious accolade, but Richard Linklater’s generally […]
A classic example of When Bad Movies Happen to Good People. Don’t get me wrong, this is not just a bad movie, it’s a dreadful one. It seems only reasonable to expect that an assemblage of talent that includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Candice Bergen and Rob Lowe might produce something that’s at […]
It offers great special effects. It’s graced by exceptional cinematography. It features a pleasant and capable cast. It delivers more than a modicum of suspense — indeed, it boasts one brilliantly cross-cut sequence of two different suspense scenes. Vertical Limit also, unfortunately, contains about five-cents-worth of plot and maybe twelve-cents-worth of dialogue. Anyone who has […]
“If you think this about vanity, you’re wrong,” says a disfigured Tom Cruise to a team of plastic surgeons in one of the more ironic moments in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky. Oh, yeah? This, I suppose, is why the actor’s face looms out 40 inches high from the movie’s poster. Co-producer Cruise can’t even manage […]
Here we go again — yet another in the seemingly endless procession of stupid teen flicks. I’m firmly convinced that no one actually makes these movies. They must breed like some peculiarly virulent strain of cockroach. This one scales the heights of inadequacy to reach the pinnacle of mediocrity. Van Wilder — or to give […]
Quite the most frightening thing about Valentine is the fact it took no less than four screenwriters to concoct this by-the-numbers slasher epic. Into this mix, factor the additional information that the film is based on a novel and that the director presumably had some input, so the total rises to no less than six […]
Roger Ebert has called this film by Jacques Rivette, one of the founders of the French “New Wave,” a “farce in waltz time.” That’s not off the mark, but I have to confess I found it more like farce paced to a dirge. It’s not a bad movie, but what it comes down to is […]
Anyone who wants to see a garbage dump so skillfully art directed and lit that it looks like an Architectural Digest spread needs to see Adrian Lyne’s latest cinematic essay on the perils of adultery, Unfaithful. It may not be quite as loony — and resultantly not as amusing — as his Fatal Attraction (a.k.a. […]
Undisputed is not for everyone — let’s settle that up front. What is undisputed about the movie is that it is violent, nasty, gut-wrenching, and pretty darn unpleasant. It’s also fascinating, disturbing, and virtually unforgettable. If you like stories about leave-no-survivors boxing, gritty low-light, eye-scrunching cinematography, ear-grinding visceral musical soundtracks, bone-crushing action, 90 minutes of […]
They say this cat, Undercover Brother is a bad mother … sorry, I was having an Isaac Hayes moment, but that’s exactly the sort of thing you can expect after seeing Undercover Brother. “This is a great day for black people of all races!” announces The Chief (Chi McBride, Gone in Sixty Seconds) of the […]
Lightning will almost certainly not strike twice for the combination of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan and star Bruce Willis, at least in terms of box-office receipts. Unbreakable — their follow-up to the immensely successful, Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense — is simply too complex, too convoluted and, ultimately, too downbeat to repeat that success (or, in […]
