Category: ★★½
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Jaws 3-D is one part advertisement for Sea World, one part disaster movie, one part monster movie, then figure the rest is character stuff. It does really well as the Sea World ad, not so well as a disaster movie, a little better as a monster movie… and shockingly well on the character stuff. Alves’s…
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Rob Thomas loves the "Veronica Mars" television show fans. He must. He pretty much wastes the first act of the feature film (also titled Veronica Mars) thanking them for funding the film's production through Kickstarter. It's worse for star Kristen Bell than the film–both recover, but the film first–as the script's moving her around like…
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G.B.F. has a lot of problems. First and foremost, it should probably be called My G.B.F. just because making it a possessive statement would add some depth before starting it. Second, worst makeup in a movie ever. It’s unclear if it’s makeup artist Gage Hubbard’s fault, cinematographer Jonathan Hall’s fault or some combination (it seems…
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Disclosure is not a serious film. It’s a sensational, workplace thriller with crowd-pleasing moments. There are occasional hints at seriousness, but director Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio (not to mention source novel author Michael Crichton) are more focused on providing entertainment than anything else. Michael Douglas’s protagonist is the least developed character in the entire…
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So much of The Poor and Hungry is so good, one wants to forgive writer-director Brewer his excesses. First off, he shot the film on some kind of consumer video. He’s completely aware of the medium’s limitations, but he still gets ambitious with the camera work and especially the editing. Brewer’s editing on Hungry is…
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Until the last few minutes of Sandcastle, I had no idea how to describe the film or its director. For the first half, I had a lot of expectations for the film and writer and director Das totally headed those off–she directly confronts the viewer’s expectations, actually. She manages to do it twice in the…
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At ninety minutes and change, Blow Dry is too short. Given the complexities of the ground situation’s character relationships and then the character’s arcs throughout the picture, it could easily run two and a half hours. The concept, which at first blush seems sensational but turns out not to be, has Natasha Richardson and Rachel…
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Is it or is it not post-modern mob “comedy” about gangster Robert De Niro going into witness protection and dragging his family to a quaint French town. There, wife Michelle Pfeiffer and kids Dianna Agron and John D’Leo have various crises in adjusting while De Niro contends with a pesky FBI handler (Tommy Lee Jones).…
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of those imperfect films. No matter how many versions, there’s no way to fix one thing without breaking another–or it might just be broken all together. For example, I don’t know if I’d ever realized how focused director Wise is–during the first hour–on William Shatner’s slightly dangerous desire…
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Director Renny Harlin often takes an interesting approach to conversations in Die Hard 2. He’ll have a character look off screen and interact with what they see, without ever establishing what they’re seeing. Oftentimes it happens with someone interacting with star Bruce Willis–Harlin only gives Willis this treatment once; it both focuses attention on Willis,…
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Wicker Park is a psychological drama, not thriller. While director McGuigan occasionally uses thriller-like foreshadowing or ominous sections, Park never forecasts its narrative. Protagonist Josh Hartnett skips an important business trip to China to search for an ex-girlfriend, but he does it all where he lives. The film takes place over three or four days…
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Red 2 is a lot of fun. It’s so much fun, in fact, most of its problems are never obvious during the actual film, only on later reflection. The film opens quickly–Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker going shopping seems to be very fast, but turns out to be one of the slowest sections of the…
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Planes, Trains & Automobiles is probably most impressive technically. The narrative is problematic but not a bad narrative, it’s just a problematic one. Director Hughes can’t decide if he wants Planes to be a comedy with John Candy or a comedy about Candy. Candy’s able to be sympathetic while still being unbelievably annoying–his performance is…
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Iron Man 3 feels a lot like the end of the series, which isn’t a bad thing–Robert Downey Jr. does the hero’s journey thing quite well–but director Black handles it oddly. After spending the entire movie pairing Downey with buddies, whether love interest Gwyneth Paltrow, sidekicks Don Cheadle and Jon Favreau, his computer and even…
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Without any subplots–and a running time, sans end credits, less than ninety minutes–it seems likely The Money Pit had some post-production issues. There are a bunch of recognizable character actors–Josh Mostel, Yakov Smirnoff, Joe Mantegna–who show up for a scene or two then disappear. Still, Money Pit is a great example of a (possibly) problematic…
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Splash has a strange narrative structure. The front’s heavy, likely because the filmmakers make a real effort to establish Tom Hanks as a listless young (well, youngish) man. Of course, Hanks is a listless man with an apparently great job as a produce whole seller, an amazing Manhattan apartment and limitless funds. Then the end’s…
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The television version of Halloween has an interesting story–the original film ran so short, when the network wanted to run it on TV, there wasn’t enough film after they cut out the violence. Carpenter was producing Halloween II at the time so he came back and filmed some more scenes to pad it out. Most…
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Besides being extremely funny and rather well-acted, Nine to Five has a lot of narrative problems. The story isn’t a mess exactly, because there’s not enough story for there to be a mess. Higgins and co-writer Patricia Resnick have an idea (Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin are suffering secretaries) and not much else.…
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Back to the Future gives the impression of being very economical in terms of its narrative… but it really isn’t. Zemeckis just does such a great job immediately establishing the fifties setting, even though there’s less than fifty minutes before the third act, the film feels more immediate. It takes a half hour to get…
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The Senator Was Indiscreet is a fun enough little film. It’s little for a few reasons; sadly, the primary one is the budget. Enough of the film takes place in William Powell’s hotel room, one would think it’s a play adaptation. The story is more ambitious than the finished film can realize. Powell’s a dimwit…
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The first third of Jack Reacher is an elegantly told procedural, with director McQuarrie emulating a seventies cop movie. Of course, there are some garnishing, but nothing monumental. Tom Cruise’s cop is actually an ex-Army cop, it takes place in the twenty-first century (but I don’t think there’s a single computer turned on in the…
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Although the title suggests otherwise, The Ghost Ship is not a supernatural thriller. It is, however, a very effective suspense picture. Russell Wade (in a sturdy lead performance) is a new officer. On his first ship out, he begins to suspect the captain–Richard Dix, who steadily gets creepier–is a little off his rocker. Of course,…
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Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even with the absolute mess of a final act, would have really benefited from a better director. Oh, Zemeckis isn’t bad. With Dean Cundey shooting the film, it’d be hard for it to look bad and it doesn’t. But Zemeckis doesn’t–apparently–know how to bring all the elements together. The film opens…
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Crocodile Dundee II isn’t really a comedy. It’s an action movie with a lot of comic moments, but it’s not a comedy. Figuring out how it’s going to not be a comedy–since it’s a sequel to a successful comedy after all–is one of its biggest problems. Director Cornell and writers Paul Hogan and Brett Hogan…
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Blind Adventure is a genial, nearly successful comedy thriller. Robert Armstrong, playing an unexpectedly wealthy working class American who’s vacationing in London, heads out into the fog and finds himself on a wild night. He encounters espionage, British society, a damsel in distress (Helen Mack) and trifle. Armstrong and Mack are wonderful together (they soon…
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With Dark Shadows, director Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith find a great formula for humor in the film, which has a lot of inherent humor in just taking place in 1972 and having vampire running around. While it’s very much comedic, Burton infuses it with a surprisingly dark element. But Johnny Depp’s lead isn’t the…
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Every shot in Manhattan, whether of the cityscape, the interiors or the actors, is so carefully and beautifully composed, it’s not surprising Allen lets the cast go a little loose. Gordon Willis’s black and white photography is luminous, giving the city an otherworldly, dreamlike feel. That feeling, thanks to Allen’s composition, carries over to some…
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Something unfortunate happens during the last third of State and Main… Mamet realizes he needs a story. He goes so long without traditional narrative elements—the film has, at best, a roaming protagonist and Mamet doesn’t do much establish the ground situation as hint at one for smiles. Mamet doesn’t go for belly laughs in the…
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A House in the Hills is, for the majority of its running time, pretty darn funny. It’s a romance novel run through a black comedy filter, with Helen Slater playing the lead. The film takes place in LA; Slater’s an actress and ends up being the one character the film never actually explains. It’s one…
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Science may make monsters, but the morale of the story–according to Tarantula anyway–is the Air Force will always be there to bomb such monsters back to the Stone Age. The problem with Tarantula is fairly simple… it’s not a movie about a giant tarantula. Oh, it might have room for one, but to make the…
The Stop Button 