Movie Reviews
Cars
The drive-in is the perfect place to see this! I had a blast. Some critics are saying that the old Pixar magic wasn’t quite there, but I don’t agree. People are already puzzling about why it didn’t earn as much the first weekend as previous Pixar releases, and I’m puzzled, too. Somebody theorized that kids (and their parents?) prefer warm, fuzzy, Read more »
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
In the beginning, there was Andy Hardy. Okay, maybe there were teen movies before that, but I don’t know them. Andy was just so … so gosh-darn enthusiastic! By golly, you wanted to smack him around some! “Hey, kids, we can use Farmer John’s barn, and we can … put on a show! What do you say, Judy?” “Gosh, Andy, that would ... Read more »
Superman Returns
Superman always was a stiff, but he’s never been stiffer than he is here. What a bore! Anything they could do wrong, they did wrong. There’s no chemistry between Stooperman and Lois. She’s got a kid. It’s obvious he’s a hybrid, part Kryptonian, part human (which might mean he’s a mule), and almost nothing is made of that. At one point he throws a piano, ... Read more »
Grindhouse
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, like a lot of movie buffs, love bad movies. The difference, I think, is that they don’t think they’re bad. They like them for themselves, not for the campy pleasure of seeing how awful they are. They like Hong Kong chop-socky, Japanese let’s-stomp-Tokyo, and those awful sexploitation grinders from the ... Read more »
Disturbia
Poor LB Jefferies. All he had was a telephone (dial-up!), a pair of binoculars, and a camera with a long lens. (Oh, and Grace Kelly to keep him company now and then.) Don’t remember old Jeff? He was the guy with the broken leg in Rear Window, which is the obvious inspiration for this film. The guy in this one is a teenager, naturally, and bored out of his ... Read more »
Next
Will the plundering of the works of Philip K Dick never cease? What’s the deal here, are the stories in the public domain? I mean, they’re good stories, but no other SF author has had nearly as many big, expensive, stupid movies made from his works. It began 25 years ago with the gorgeous but overwrought and illogical Blade Runner (from the novel ... Read more »
Shrek the Third
The reviews were not good, which is good … I mean, in the sense that my expectations were lowered. They needn’t have been. I liked it. True, nothing is going to beat the originality of the first one, and it wasn’t even as good as the second, but when you start off from a point as high as Shrek, you can come down considerably and still be worth ... Read more »
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Read my reviews of #1 and #2 (it won’t take you long), add a lot of dittos, especially the part about not remembering much about brainless action pictures I saw 4 years and 1 year ago, respectively. Do any of you actually recall the plots of those movies, unless you’ve seen them multiple times? We sure didn’t. I had no idea what the ... Read more »
Knocked Up
Judd Apatow was the writer/director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which I thought was dandy, and this one is, too. There are no plot surprises, it goes pretty much as you would expect it to go, but the way it gets there is all the charm. Apatow seems to like nerds—we heard him interviewed on NPR and he seems a bit of a nerd himself—and he likes the nerd to get the ... Read more »
Ocean’s 13
When Ocean’s 12 came out I posted a short review, and a facetious review of ((Ocean’s 13}}: Don’t press your luck, Steve, referring to Steven Soderbergh, who usually goes in for much edgier stuff than this, but has done an adequate job on these frothy caper movies. He does it again in 13. It is very complex, and you don’t believe a ... Read more »