I Married a Witch

Thorne Smith drank himself to death before he could finish the book this is based on. It was completed by Norman H. Matson. Smith’s trademark fantasy stories (he was best known for creating the Topper books) were considered quite racy in the ‘30s, and are pretty tame now, but still a lot of fun. This one was directed by Rene Clair and stars Fredric March and Veronica Lake.

Sometimes ... Read more »

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Sometimes a second feature at the drive-in is a bonus, sometimes it’s a cross you have to bear … but only for 30 minutes or so, until the screen has been stunk up so bad that you flee in terror. This one was a 15-minute stinker.

I.Q.

It sounded real promising. It’s the early 1950s at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. Meg Ryan is the niece of Albert Einstein. Tim Robbins is an auto mechanic. To win her hand, he pretends to be a sort of natural physics genius, helped along by Albert (Walter Matthau, who hardly needs much makeup to look like Einstein) and his friends, including real characters like Kurt ... Read more »

I, Robot

Everything about this ho-hum thriller goes for the safe and totally predictable and awesomely boring. We are way, way past the point where seeing thousands and thousands of robots on the attack is mind-blowing.

But the heck with it. It’s what we know how to do.

Let’s see, a film about robots … I know! They run amok! There’s some flaw in the programming … or, ... Read more »

I Served the King of England

Sometimes I see a film and enjoy myself quite a lot … and afterward just don’t know what to say about it. I’m not even sure I understood what it was doing. This one is like that. It concerns a little go-getter in Czechoslovakia in the pre-war years. He aspires to get rich, gets a Nazi girlfriend, there is a war, he gets rich, then the communists make it a crime to be rich and he goes to ... Read more »

I Smile Back

Sarah Silverman is one of the funniest people on Planet Earth. I don’t know what planet she calls home, but when she visits us she graces us with her extremely weird brand of humor. Now she has decided to branch out into serious drama, and for her debut she has picked one of the most depressing scripts of the year.

Laney is outwardly doing pretty well, with a huge ... Read more »

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Very few franchises can survive Installment #3, and this isn’t an exception. It is lovely to look at, as pretty much all computer animation is these days, but the plot didn’t involve me at all. The only thing I remembered from the first movie was an ingenious sequence with a squirrel and an acorn. Very funny. Apparently everybody else thought so, too, because in this one the squirrel and ... Read more »

The Ice Harvest

Directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and directed the staggeringly good Groundhog Day, screenplay by Robert Benton, starring Billy Bob, John Cusack, and Oliver Platt … how bad can it be? Not too bad, but not very good, either. It’s not a caper where everything goes wrong; these guys have already stolen $2,000,000 in the first scene. Then things go ... Read more »

Ice Princess

Hollywood churns out about a dozen sports movies a year, and the most you can expect of most of them is a mild rush of euphoria when the underdog wins. They take the same basic plot, file off the serial numbers, and make the same movie whether the sport is football, baseball, golf, tennis, arm wrestling, badminton, ping-pong, or barrel jumping. I think it’s time for a curling movie, ... Read more »

The Iceman

During the ‘50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s (and possibly going back to as early as 1948) Richard Kuklinski murdered between 100 and 300 people, depending on whose figures you believe … and even he gave various numbers while he was still alive. He may have been exaggerating, but it’s clear that he killed a whole bunch of people. When he started off he did it for fun, but later he was a ... Read more »