Movie Reviews
District 9
What a huge letdown. This has been touted as the SF movie with a brain, a subtext, a message. It’s all about intolerance, and it was made in South Africa, that former poster country for institutionalized discrimination. And it is, for about 2/3 of the movie. Then it gets as dumb as Transformers or Terminator Salvation …
It starts ...
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The Final Destination
Horror movies are really the perfect genre for hack writers, especially in these days of the horror movie “franchise.” Halloween I through Halloween XX (some of which haven’t even been made yet!) are all the same movie. How easy it must be to simply write the same script twenty times! You name it: A Nightmare on Elm ... Read more »
Transformers
To my considerable surprise—nay, even astonishment—I actually liked this movie until the obligatory over-the-top gun battle/fist fight/car-wrecking/mega explosion ending. I was prepared for it to be about as deeply characterized as those crazy Hasbro toys it was based on, but it was a lot more than that. The transformers themselves were dazzling, as we’ve come to expect, but this was on a ... Read more »
Spiderman 3
I get awful tired of films with a 3 in the title. Sometimes a 2 is good, but that’s seldom the case with a 3. And you know if it’s gone to a 3, then a 4 can’t be far away. I’m dreading Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Number 3 was already looking a bit tired.
That said, this wasn’t all that bad. Plot and character seem to matter more in these Spiderman movies ...
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Norbit
Eddie Murphy used to be a comic genius. What the hell happened? He’s still a big-money player in this town, with his voice work on the Shrek series and his Oscar nomination for Dreamgirls. But how do you explain The Haunted Mansion, Daddy Day Care, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Klumps, and this piece of ... Read more »
Jennifer’s Body
When you win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in your first time at bat, like Diablo Cody did with Juno, it’s no surprise that expectations will be high for your next film. And when you’re Diablo Cody and a whole lot of industry people really, really don’t like you because you aren’t what they want and expect from a screenwriter, you should probably be ... Read more »
Mr. Woodcock
There is a short film on the DVD titled something like “Gym Class Horror Stories,” where many of the cast and crew of this film go back to those awful days of misery, pain, and sadism known as Physical Education. Of more than a dozen people interviewed, only one admitted to never having had any problems in gym class with a sadistic teacher. Even Billy Bob Thornton, whose dad was the ... Read more »
The Proposal
There are more possible story arcs for a romantic comedy than the standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl … but not many. One of them is boy and girl hate each other (or are simply wildly incompatible), boy and girl are thrown together in a comic situation, boy and girl fall in love. I’ll bet you’ve seen a hundred of them. This doesn’t have to be bad. There are very few ... Read more »
Surrogates
The idea of people staying perpetually at home and interacting through television is not a new one. Neither is the use of remotely-controlled robots as stand-ins. Many science fiction stories have dealt with these themes, and I think there have probably been movies about it, too, though I can’t bring one to mind just now. There are all sorts of possibilities here, and this movie manages to ... Read more »
Mr. Bean’s Holiday
Rowan Atkinson’s “Mr. Bean” series is one of the most brilliant things ever to come out of British television, right up there with “Fawlty Towers” and Atkinson’s other masterpiece, the “Blackadder” series. So why was the first movie, Bean, absolutely dreadful, to the point that I couldn’t bear to watch beyond the halfway point? What happened?
Mr. Bean is … ...
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