Category: 2001
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I’m hesitant to call Amélie whimsical, though it’s the closest adjective. The film’s kind of a French New Wave-inspired fairy tale, except instead of being about magic magic, it’s about the magic of the everyday and, especially, its residents. There’s also something decidedly not fairy tale about protagonist Audrey Tautou’s quests. Broadly, Amélie is about…
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D-Day Dodgers ends with a ten-page series of splash pages, with artist John Higgins moving through a battlefield, a poem accompanying the imagery. The poem, “The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers,” is from an unknown author. Higgins’s pages tie the poem’s lines to the various characters we’ve met throughout the issue, which is a fairly…
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I was a little curious whether writer Garth Ennis was going to be able to get away withJohann’s Tiger in 2023. The comic came out twenty years ago when Nazis and Nazi sympathizers weren’t (openly) part of the public discourse. Tiger is one of those “German army” stories, though. They’re not Nazis; they don’t like…
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Hitman: Closing Time opens the only way it can (or should) following the previous collection’s gut-wrenching conclusion, which saw Tommy’s surrogate father, Sean, die protecting him. It starts with a Lobo crossover. And writer Garth Ennis spends the entire issue shitting on Lobo. It’s a done-in-one crossover with art from Doug Mahnke. The art’s perfectly…
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Part special effects spectacular, part protracted romantic melodrama has Navy nurse Kate Beckinsale coming between best buds and Army fliers Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. Will they have time to resolve the love triangle as World War II looms and they all get stationed at, you guessed it, Pearl Harbor? Really bad script (by Randall…
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Either Evan Dorkin’s got the Eltingville TV rights back or whoever has them is a complete numbskull because the book’s so relevant you could subtitle it “An Incel Fable” and it’d be totally appropriate, narratively speaking. But it’d be somewhat intellectually dishonest, as Dorkin started The Eltingville Club long before the incels had a self-identity…
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I have no idea how I’m going to talk about Small Favors; it’s my first “erotic” comic. Possibly ever. (The first edition of Lost Girls is sitting on my shelf, still unread). The collection’s subtitle is “The Definitive Girly Porno Collection.” I’m just worried what kind of SEO I’m going to get from frequent usages…
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If you had told me there was a movie with John Cleese in funny fake teeth and Smash Mouth as a plot point (a positive one), I don’t know I would’ve believed it. But if there is going to be a movie with John Cleese in funny fake teeth and Smash Mouth as in a…
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Disco Pigs might not be the best title for Disco Pigs, but it’s hard to imagine any other title for it so an imperfect one is better than a wrong one. Maybe disco had some appropriate cultural Irish relevancy. Or maybe playwright Enda Walsh, who adapted the screenplay himself, couldn’t think of anything else either.…
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Gotham Noir is a Jim Gordon story. Only he’s ex-cop Jim Gordon, divorced ex-cop Jim Gordon, just trying to get by as a private investigator. Only he’s a drunk. It’s 1949 and Gordon had a bad time in the war. Bruce Wayne was there. Bruce Wayne knows the secrets. Lots of secrets in Gotham Noir.…
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Ghost of Mars has a lot of earnestness going for it. Director Carpenter needs quite a bit his cast and he supports them even when they’re clearly not able to succeed–especially lead Natasha Henstridge. He takes the project seriously, his cast takes it seriously. Sure, it doesn’t exactly work out, but it’s not from lack…
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While watching Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, I had a daydream. I day dreamt Craig Armstrong, composer of The Incredible Hulk score, had been brought in the redo the score of Attack for the U.S. home video market. He did not. Instead, Ôtani Kô actually did compose the score for the…
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Properly exhibited, Les Grands Ensembles should be projected in an art gallery. In an endless loop. The film runs just under eight minutes. In it, artist Pierre Huyghe tells a strange little story about two buildings. Now, the full title of the piece is (apparently) Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects), and so, one should…
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Jason X is wonderfully bad. I don’t think it’s intended to be camp, but who knows. It certainly plays as high camp, possibly the best camp at the expense of the Friday the 13th series. Maybe if it were just a little less gory…. Todd Farmer’s script borrows a number of set pieces and dialogue…
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An undercover cop (Paul Walker) finds himself drawn into a criminal underworld with a charismatic leader (Vin Diesel)! There’s not much original about The Fast and the Furious. What the screenwriters don’t lift out of Point Break, there’s director Cohen grabbing car chase related moments out of Lethal Weapon 3 and so on. Well, Cohen…
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The Devil’s Backbone takes place at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War (in Spain, obviously). The film follows Fernando Tielve as he arrives and has conflicts with the other boys, before everything gets worked out. For about half the film, one of the other boys, Íñigo Garcés, is the antagonist. But everything with the…
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The most important action in My Sassy Girl takes place off screen–the film takes place over a few years (though the main action is over three and a half months), with listless Cha Tae-hyun home from compulsory national service and back in school and having no idea what to do with his life. Enter Jun…
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Donnie Darko has one of those discussion begging conclusions. So I’ll skip that aspect entirely and concentrate what director Kelly does so well. There’s a meticulous design to Darko but it’s mostly unimportant; once you get past the MacGuffin, it’s just this story about a teenage schizophrenic’s life coming apart. Jake Gyllenhaal is outstanding in…
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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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“Electra Woman and Dyna Girl” is a nearly awesome pilot. Sadly, its problems make it clear a series would have been terrible. Anne Stedman plays a college freshman who tracks down the superhero who once saved her life. The superhero, played by Markie Post, is long retired and probably hasn’t been sober in years. Elisa…
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Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles is a terrible movie. But it’s not offensive, which makes it peculiar. It’s cringeworthy, with most of its L.A. jokes being about ten years too late. It even has a movie studio finish–an awful sequence–which doesn’t rip-off of Beverly Hills Cop III, but does make one remember what happens when…
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While The Tailor of Panama is on firm ground in and of itself, it’s difficult not to think about in the context of James Bond. Pierce Brosnan plays a brutal, womanizing British secret agent and sort of gives cinema it’s only realistic Bond movie. Of course, mentioning James Bond is something to get out of…
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One of the best gags in Wet Hot American Summer is having the twenty and (some) thirty somethings play teenage summer camp counselors. One big problem? Not making the gag clear until the end of the movie. It would have gotten a lot more mileage throughout. Summer goes out on an awkward note–almost an homage…
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The actor playing Josh Hartnett’s mother (and Martin Sheen’s wife) doesn’t get a credit in O. She doesn’t have any lines, doesn’t really make any noise, just looks down at the dinner table during a scene. But she’s a perfect example of how Nelson paints subtlety and sadness into the film’s canvas. She’s mentioned once…
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Jurassic Park III is about a third of a movie. Even though it runs ninety minutes (minus however many minutes in end credits), there aren’t any characters and the running time is mostly spent on the action beats of a better movie. Instead of being a movie about genetically engineered dinosaurs left to their own…
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I wonder how long it takes Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen to script their action movies. None are ever very long (or very good—for the most part) and they’re all exceptionally simple. Maybe they have some kind of fun method to it, like they get a Domino’s pizza and write one in a night,…
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Sidewalks of New York is Edward Burns embracing the idea of becoming the WASP Woody Allen. Well, Burns is Irish Catholic, so not exactly the WASP Woody Allen… but something nearer to it than not. It’s his attempt at making a quintessential New York movie while being aware he’s making a quintessential New York movie.…
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I’ve always found A Knight’s Tale’s lack of popular (or critical) success surprising. Besides the obvious–Heath Ledger when he was still doing the young Mel Gibson thing, only mixed with a more mature Gibson’s consciousness of his charm–it’s absolutely hilarious. Helgeland had a problematic relationship with Gibson, but certainly knew how to write for him…
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Ross’s Rendezvous with Rama is student film, but more like an effects demo reel. It’s CG and one actor mixed together. The all-CG shots are better than the composites, which feel very “video.” The all-CG shots have a far smoother move to them. But it’s also the short film as a movie trailer. I think…
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Lovely Day is a series of clips—it opens with the American flag around Manhattan and ends with a thank you sign to the NYPD and FDNY, but otherwise, it has little to do with 9/11, at least ten years later (it was part of “The Concert for New York City” benefit concert)—set to Bill Wither’s…
The Stop Button 