Category: 2003
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There’s a very interesting throwaway line in The Recruit. During the traitor’s confession, there’s an implication the betrayal occurred following the CIA ignoring information they could have used to prevent 9/11. Like everything related to 9/11, it’s all implied (this one is less obvious than the others), but it’s definitely there. Given the film seems…
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So Edward Norton hated making The Italian Job? I’m shocked. (According to the Internet gossip, it was to fulfill a Paramount contract–they even gave him a car… I don’t remember if it was a Mini Cooper). It’s the lamest role Norton’s ever played. As an actor without a persona, he doesn’t belong in the Italian…
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And Millar brings it around… relatively. It’s a big huge fight scene with the fate of the solar system in the balance so maybe he gets some easy melodramatic points (he sure doesn’t score anything with the Captain America versus Nazi Skrull punch-out, not until the whole “A for America” thing, which doesn’t really sit…
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Oh, good grief…. Have you seen Independence Day? Or any of the millions of Body Snatchers type movies? Millar has. I know I’m reading way too much into The Ultimates, but come on… Millar’s got thirteen issues and he doesn’t do anything with this one. Seriously, I don’t think Marvel can say anything bad about…
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Sigh. An all-action issue. Not even an action-packed all-action issue. It’s a non-action-packed all-action double cross issue. The Wasp’s twenty-six? Really? She’d have been nine when St. Elmo’s Fire came out, which makes it an awkward pop culture reference. It’s funny, but it doesn’t hold up to any thought whatsoever. Oh, wait, I just summed…
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When did the Soviet Union fall? Let’s check wikipedia. Ah, 1991. So Hawkeye has been in S.H.I.E.L.D. for over eleven years, putting him in his thirties somewhere, I assume. Shame Hitch draws him in his mid-twenties. Actually, if it hadn’t been for that last line about the Soviet Union, I was going to open with…
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You know what, this issue isn’t terrible. I mean, it’s bad, but not in comparison to the rest of the series. Robocop is in it, more than usual, and as comic relief instead of the protagonist, but whatever, at least he’s in the comic book. And some of the ideas–presumably Miller’s–are actually somewhat entertaining here.…
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Here’s where the comic sort of jumps off the deep end. I do want to point out how poorly Grant uses the commercial breaks, which are funny, in this issue. He doesn’t do them with any related news program, so there’s just story, commercial, story. He certainly hasn’t set up a comic book where he…
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And here Robocop is even less of a character. Grant (or Miller?) has found a character he wants to follow, a voluptuous female version of Dr. Phil who can guide the story. The supporting cast here is really thin; since Ryp doesn’t exactly do likenesses (at all), the familiar movie cast is identifiable only by…
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There’s technically twenty-two pages of story here, but so much of it is wasted–five pages alone, at the front, go to showing clips of television shows of the future (Grant adds, presumably, the material about TV being safe for all kids, since when Miller wrote his Robocop 2 script it was 1988 or whatever)–it doesn’t…
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There’s no doubt Stephen Norrington’s a lousy director but he’s not atrocious enough someone should retire from acting because he or she had to work with him–and Sean Connery didn’t even get the worst scenes in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s a stunt casting of Connery and, when compared to the source material–it’s no…
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I think The Matrix! Part Trois has to be better than the second one, if only because it’s not as terribly boring in its action sequences. The second one had that highway battle and it was bad and the Keanu Reeves versus a million Hugo Weavings and it was bad. Here, Keanu Reeves fights one…
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Didn’t John Woo used to have a style? I mean, I know he had birds and he had the guns pointed at each other, but didn’t he have some style? He’s got no style in Paycheck, which ends up being one of the best movies John Badham never made. It’s a complete time waster, the…
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The Wachowskis get to do whatever they want with The Matrix Reloaded so they do this bombastic, pseudo-intellectual sequel and they’re totally bored with it. It’s very obviously not what they want to be doing with their time. They got about as much mileage out of the Matrix as they could in the first one…
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X-Men 2–sorry, X2–is one of the worst movies I’ve ever sat through, if not the worst. Singer does a lousy job on X2. It looks like it was filmed in Canada on a restricted budget; it looks goofy and cheap. The story is idiotic and the script is terrible. There’s no good split between the…
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Taxi 3 starts with a superior set-up, a James Bond-esque chase scene through Marseilles, the good guy on a bicycle, running from the bad guys (on rollerblades). It’s goofy and funny–the best part being the bad guy running into a plexiglass (being carried on the street, a riff on the standard glass) and bouncing off…
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Thanks to Joint Security Area, I was leery of Oldboy going in. While Park Chan-wook has a large fan base, all JSA did was convince me they weren’t seeing the same movie. Finally, after Oldboy, I can understand why he has the fan base… and it’s unfortunate. Park had his big revelation ending to Joint…
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A Good Lawyer’s Wife is beautifully directed. Im shot it Super 35 (full frame, then cropping it down to 2.35:1) and he uses a lot of steadicam, creating these fragile, exquisite compositions. Usually when I kick off with a description of the excellent technical filmmaking, it isn’t a particularly good sign. This one is no…
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The Uninvited is a technically a horror movie, I suppose. There are ghosts and all. With the exception of the protagonist finding a kindred spirit–and her seeing ghosts too–the whole thing could work as a drama about trauma. In fact, as a drama, it would work well. During the movie, when the inevitable dumb horror…
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Hulk had a huge box office drop-off after its opening weekend–wow, almost seventy percent. It’s actually somewhat lucky, because I’d have thought people would have gotten up and walked out of the theater. The Hulk doesn’t show up until about an hour into the movie and doesn’t do anything interesting for another half hour after…
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Richard Curtis–I think–said he wrote Love Actually from all his unused ideas. Just threw them into the oven and baked them together. To some degree, it shows. Unlike the usual big cast films, with lots of incidental meetings and relationships (as P.T. Anderson wrote, these things “happen all the time”), Love Actually is very loose.…
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I thought there were no anti-conservative Hollywood films for a long while after 9/11, so I guess Runaway Jury went under the radar. It appears to have been a significant bomb and, watching it, it seemed strange to see John Grisham’s name on screen. It’s been a long time since adaptations of his novels have…
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Most of Quicksand plays like a multi-national mystery from the 1970s, filled with familiar faces (or a few familiar faces anyway). About three-quarters of it, approximately. There’s good and bad stuff in those seventy minutes. Michael Keaton’s excellent, which isn’t surprising. Michael Caine shows up for what appears to be a small role (it gets…
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Japanese manga adaptations tend to be absurd–at the same time amateurish and sublime, as all the actors in Battlefield Baseball keep a straight face throughout. The movie’s low budget, so very few of the punches connect and waiting for Versus’s Sakaguchi to have similar, beautifully choreographed fight scenes (even with Kitamura producing) is in vain.…
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Sky High has got to be one of the stupider movies I’ve ever seen. There are other factors contributing to it being bad, as stupidity doesn’t necessarily undo a film, but it’s real stupid. Shockingly, the screenwriter worked on Kitamura’s perfectly fine Azumi. Sky High‘s a prequel to a TV series, which is an adaptation…
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While the Koreans do make the best ‘dying girl with mysterious illness falls in love’ better than anyone else, I’m not sure it’s an honor one would want. The amazing thing about how well they make these films is I don’t have any complaints with the writing of …ing. It’s fine. It’s effective, engaging, occasionally…
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Bad Santa confused me a little. I’m not sure why I expected it to be something other than a traditional Hollywood redemption story–maybe because of Terry Zwigoff, maybe because I didn’t know (or didn’t remember from trailers and buzz) it was about Santa robbing malls. After seeing Zwigoff’s Ghost World, I avoided Bad Santa because…
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Has copyright lapsed on John Williams’s “Promenade (Tourists on the Menu)” composition from Jaws, because this film uses it all the time. While Undead is a fun little movie, I’m pretty sure Lionsgate would get their butts sued off if it got out they were violating such an obvious copyright, and I have to go…
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I saw the director’s cut of Aliens when it first came out in 1991. I didn’t have my own laserdisc player (and going downstairs was too far), so I probably didn’t watch Aliens again for quite a few years, if ever. Once you’ve seen the director’s cut, there’s no point in going back to the…
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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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