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Movie Reviews
Review: Walk the Line
In the opening moments of Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) gently thumbs the edge of a buzzsaw in the wood shop of Folsom Prison moments before his infamous concert before its inmates. The blade of this saw, an instrument which altered the course of Cash’s life when he was eleven years old, sums [...]
Review: War of the Worlds
One of the things I most admire about Steven Spielberg is his ability–and his willingness–to balance his desire to make his deepely personal Films with his desire to make big-budget crowd-pleasing popcorn-chomping Flicks. He’s equally adept at making both kinds of movies and has created classic examples of each, though I have to admit I [...]
Review: The Upside of Anger
Joan Allen does staid-and-proper so well, she seldom gets the chance to play sexy. In fact, I can’t remember ever finding her particularly sexy in any movie I’ve ever seen her in. I don’t mean that as a knock against Allen; so many of the parts she’s played have called for Frosty Joan or All-Business [...]
Review: Layer Cake
Take a story about several denizens of the criminal British underworld, mix in a few spoonfuls of dark humor and a couple of cups of violence, a handful of plot twists to taste, and what do you end up with? Snatch. Well, OK, yes, you do, but if you mix the recipe up a bit [...]
Review: Fantastic Four
Calling the 1961 comic debut of the Fantastic Four groundbreaking would no doubt elicit a cry of “It’s clobberin’ time!” from super-hero historians and rabid comic fans worldwide. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s vision of a super-powered team filtered through the dynamic of an otherwise normal “family” not only broke new ground, it forged a [...]
Review: Batman Begins
One thought kept bouncing through my head over and over as I watched Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan‘s magnificent reconceptualizaion of the Batman mythos: “They get it.” Director Nolan (Memento, Insomnia) and co-screenwriter David Goyer understand that audiences don’t want to see the primary-color pap of Joel Schumacher‘s last two Batman travesties. We don’t want superhero [...]
Review: Team America: World Police
Man, Trey Parker has got no love for Michael Bay. Not only is Team America: World Police constructed as a brutal satire of the lamebrained explody Bay oeuvre (Transformers and the trainwreck Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the Bad Boys flicks, The Rock, Armageddon), he even has a song in the movie devoted entirely to [...]
Review: Serenity
I found myself experiencing the same problem trying to decide on an approach for this review that I’d imagine the creators of Serenity faced: how to gear the movie/review so that it pleases both the rabid fanbase of the “Firefly” TV series from which the movie spawned and people who’ve never seen the show. It’s [...]
Review: Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
So at least we’ve seen the whole story; the ends of the circle finally meet in the middle. We’ve seen how innocence (well, angry and whiny frustrated innocence, anyway) finds itself corrupted by absolute (and a bit melodramatic) evil and becomes the face of the devil for a generation of consumers. We’ve seen enough poor [...]
Review: A Love Song for Bobby Long
The New Orleans found in A Love Song for Bobby Long doesn’t map to the real New Orleans: it’s a romantic impression of a mythical New Orleans, all hot jazz and cool rain, a city imagined by writers for generations as a safe haven for broken creatives. This New Orleans can’t help, of course, but [...]
Review: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
At some point during the last few years–I think quite likely it was during the making of Charlie’s Angels, if not earlier–Bill Murray decided it was time for him to put away his trademarked schtick for awhile and do some actual acting. Oh, he’d tried doing the dramatic stuff early in his career, of course, [...]
Review: In Good Company
It happens all the time in all manner of businesses, from Hollywood backlots to sports fields to corporate boardrooms: seasoned, talented veteran with plenty of good years left gets pushed to the side in favor of hotshot rookie with none of the experience but all of the flash and promise. Our culture has never been [...]
Review: Ray
We all know the familiar dark glasses, the side-to-side sway and euphoric smile as music pours from the piano, the raspy voice that should be part of the dictionary entry for “soulful”; Ray Charles has been such an icon for so long that it’s probable most of us born after 1970 or so don’t truly [...]
A Leaf on the Wind
Some thoughts on the best sci-fi western based off of a cancelled TV series ever!
Review: Heat
At first glance, you might see the outlines of familiar cliches and think Michael Mann‘s Heat to be something it’s not: you see Al Pacino‘s Vincent Hanna as a kind of supercop, a crusader with well-honed detective skills willing to break whatever rules are necessary to nab the bad guys; you see Robert DeNiro‘s Neil [...]
Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I don’t consider myself a die-hard Adams junkie, at least not anymore; I haven’t read any of the books in years. They’re pretty much fondly-remembered relics of my nerdy adolesence at this point. And given that I hadn’t read “Hitchhiker’s” in so long, I thought I’d be able to separate what the movie was trying to accomplish from what the book set out to do, to judge the movie on its own merits instead of simply judging how faithfully it aped its source material. But that proved more difficult that I’d anticipated.
Review: Ocean’s Twelve
Ocean’s Eleven was one of my favorite movies of 2001: great cast of actors and an excellent director (Steven Soderbergh) making an easy, fluffy movie and obviously having a ball doing it. The witty interplay between the characters and the slickly-executed heist succeeded largely because the A-list stars were obviously having fun making the movie. [...]
Review: Sideways
Miles Raymond, the wine connossuier at the heart of Alexander Payne‘s Sideways, would surely have looked down on, if not openly mocked, the bottle of wine the wife and I opened up as we cozied down on the couch to watch this fascinating movie. The wine was an ’02 Firesteed pinot noir, and though Miles [...]
Review: Troy
The story of the Trojan War as told in Homer’s Iliad seems like it would feature all of the elements needed to make a classic (so to speak) epic film: larger-than-life characters (and gods, even); young lovers risking everything in order to be together; violent clashes of massive armies as well as personal blood fueds; [...]
Review: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle
Have you ever wanted anything so badly that you were willing to do almost anything to get it? To traverse any terrain no matter how treacherous, to endure the cruel ravages of the elements, to best any foe who stood between you and your object of desire? Have you ever been possessed by a craving [...]
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