Category: ★★★
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Not too long ago, I used to get excited when good actors would make movies together. They didn’t have to be great movies, Barbet Schroeder could have directed them or Sandra Bullock could have starred in them–I’m fairly certain this period was known as the 1990s. It’s taken me three years to see Piccadilly Jim,…
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Supposedly, Magicians came out on DVD (pan and scanned), then disappeared as the releasing company went under. Merendino shot it Panavision, so there was some painful cropping. It’s still possible to see some of what Merendino was doing, but sometimes I just had to imagine how much more effective it would be. Merendino’s a filmmaker…
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Delusion opens poorly. It opens like an independent film (not a Miramax release or a Fox Searchlight, but something a guy who owns a chain of car washes invested in) and it opens poorly, like most independent films open. The acting is bad, the writing is bad (the direction is fine). I’ve seen Delusion before…
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About halfway through 8 Million Ways to Die, I realized–thanks to a boom mike–my twenty year-old laserdisc was open matte, not pan and scan. The widescreen zoomed suddenly made the shots tighter and crisper, regaining Ashby’s usually calmness. I suppose I should have stopped and went back to the beginning to see if it made…
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The Ex reminds me of a 1980s comedy, but maybe not. Maybe more a 1990s comedy. I knew it did, but I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized it’s all about the information given the viewer. The Ex starts in New York and moves to Ohio in the first seven and a half minutes…
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I wanted to see Bubba Ho-Tep back when I first read about it because it sounded weird–Bruce Campbell as an old Elvis versus a mummy with Ossie Davis as JFK as his sidekick. The pairing of Davis and Campbell is weird enough–they seem at odds, style-wise, not to mention Davis is actually old while Campbell’s…
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I’m worried I’m tired. The last time I watched Versus, I gave it one. This time I give it three. There’s a slight difference in the version I watched–this time I watched the “Ultimate Version,” which has about the same running time, but ten minutes of reshot scenes. I guess there were some music changes,…
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The amusement factor. Does that term even make any sense? Ocean’s Twelve is, in case anyone watching it was confused (which I find hard to believe, but of the principals, only George Clooney makes exclusively smart movies so Brad Pitt and Matt Damon fans are suspect), about enjoying itself. It throws itself a party no…
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A Civil Action is somewhere in between a modestly budgeted Hollywood drama (you know, the kind they don’t make anymore unless it’s for Oscar season) and a wildly passionate–well, not art film, but it’s certainly something else. Steven Zaillian casts the film with a knowing grown-up indie eye (William H. Macy, Dan Hedaya playing a…
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Tedious. Tedious is a good word for Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train. The polite way of saying tedious is deliberate–as in, the filmmakers very surely lay it out, taking their time and making sure they get it right. After fifty minutes of Warm Nights–it’s a ninety-minute film–I finally realized what was so damn…
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It’s probably impossible to describe Tokyo Zombie’s wackiness. It is a comedic zombie movie, but the zombies themselves aren’t comedic. They’re really not a part of the film except as… I don’t know. They’re not villains or monsters. They’re just silly. The center of Tokyo Zombie is love. Specifically, the love of jujitsu. The story…
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For a while–during the film–A Scanner Darkly is a great film. It sets itself up as a significant examination of man’s identity and its relation to the people around him. It’s based on Philip K. Dick and that theme is one Dick used at least one other time (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). When…
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Scoop starts out on awkward footing. The film follows Ian McShane’s recently deceased reporter on the boat across the Styx, where he gets a great scoop. McShane’s great and Woody makes the scene a lot of fun. Unfortunately, when Scarlett Johansson and Woody the actor show up in the next scenes, they can’t compare to…
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Welcome to Dongmakgol is about an idyllic village in the midst of the Korean War. Two soldiers from the South, three from the North, and an American flyer end up there. Obviously, they learn people are just people and wars are a bad idea, but Dongmakgol revels in itself so much, it’s impossible to dismiss…
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Delmer Daves–for someone whose directing occasionally makes me cover my eyes in fright–does an all right job with The Very Thought of You. He has these tight close-ups and, while there are only a few of them, they work out quick well. Otherwise, technically speaking, he doesn’t have many tricks. He’s on the low end…
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I occasionally–or often, depending on the films I’m going through–start a post saying how much I was dreading the film and how well it turned out. Usually, these are films I used to love and haven’t seen in ten years and was worried about them. I wasn’t dreading Escape from the Planet of the Apes,…
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Paul Newman must have had an interesting experience directing Man-in-the Moon Marigolds. His wife played the lead and their daughter played her daughter, the film’s protagonist. The mother’s awful (Joanne Woodward isn’t awful, the character is awful) and Newman sticks with her. Woodward manages to infuse her with some humanity, but only so much is…
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So all Song Kang-ho needs is a good movie… Well, not quite. In my Foul King post, I accused Song of being the weak link in Korean cinema and maybe he’s not. Maybe he just makes some bad choices. Still, in Memories of Murder, he plays a well-intentioned buffoon of a detective facing a rural…
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Wow, Watch on the Rhine’s got it all. Not only does it have a nice metaphor for the United States waking up to the horrors of the Nazis and determining to do something about it (which the United States never did), it’s also got a nice ending telling mothers their place is to send their…
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Watching Fighting for Love is frustrating. Rapid-fire dialogue–straight out of a Howard Hawks comedy–is difficult to get in subtitles, especially poorly translated ones. Still, the charm of the actors comes through and Fighting for Love is probably the best mediocre romantic comedy I’ve seen in a long time, at least of the recently-made (since 1998)…
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From the first scene of Support Your Local Sheriff!, I thought of one thing: Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks lifted the tone of the frontier townspeople scenes, just giving them ribald dialogue. In Sheriff, the humor poked at the Western stereotypes is smarter and funnier. The characters themselves are–in character–aware of the absurdities of the genre…
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In addition to being the first film of Andrew V. McLaglen’s I’ve seen (which is quite an achievement, considering how much he directed), Shenendoah is the first film I’ve seen where James Stewart plays the patriarch. Unless Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation counts and I don’t think it does, not like Shenendoah. The film sets…
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Despite the description–Robert Taylor guiding a hundred mail-order brides from the Middle West to California in 1851–having the potential for a lot of cute comedy, the film is anything but. It’s a rough, indifferent narrative (outside the romance subplot), where no one is safe from the harsh realities of the trip. Great Taylor performance, strong…
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Good but not great comedy about socialite Myrna Loy suing a newspaper for libel and editor Spencer Tracy enlisting fiancée Jean Harlow and pal William Powell to try and foil Loy. Harlow and, eventually, Tracy become third wheels in a Loy and Powell picture, with Harlow getting the least out of the film. Tracy has…
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Apparently, all Kevin Connor needs–besides a decently concocted screenplay–is location shooting and a good score. The People That Time Forgot–around the halfway point–became a movie I found myself enjoying too much. I got self-conscious about it, questioning its quality even more than usual, just because it seemed so good. It’s an adventure film, one told…
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Often excellent, deliberate drama about forty-ish Lee Mi-suk having an affair with much younger Lee Jung-jae. Lee Mi-suk is phenomenal throughout, but the film’s very uneven between the first and second halves. In the first half, the film could just as easily be establishing Lee Jung-jae as a stalker while cuckold Song Young-chang seems like…
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Exceeding entertaining comedic crime thriller about Josh Hartnett getting stuck between warring New York crime bosses Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley. The cast–also including Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis, and Stanley Tucci–is enough to make it watchable but the film’s got an excellent script (by Jason Smilovic) and direction from McGuigan. Great lead performance from Hartnett,…
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Good coming of age story about natural born hippie Ben Lee breaking away from his parents and attempt to go square after high school, going to work in an insurance office. There’s lots of office drone tropes, but agreeably executed. McNamara is a fine director; he works hard to keep the viewer entertained. Rose Byrne…
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Not a buddy movie buddy movie about aged New York cop Bruce Willis transporting witness Mos Def the titular number of blocks while Willis’s cop buddies are trying to assassinate Def. Great performance from Willis, great chemistry between him and Def, strong direction–with a just right, lighter tone–from Donner. Phenomenal (of course) supporting performance from…
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Fun–which is appropriate since director Jackson referred to this extended version as “The Director’s Fun Cut”–slapstick horror comedy about a ghost hunter (Michael J. Fox) who finds himself having to deal with actually dangerous ghosts, instead of just the amusing kind. Along the way he romances Trini Alvarado and battles a crazy FBI agent (Jeffrey…
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