Movie Reviews
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
I believe I really tried to dislike this, but it kept sneaking up on me and hitting me on the funnybone, hard. I don’t know if this is where Will Ferrell came up with the crude, obnoxious, gross, good-old-boy that you know you should hate but end up kind of liking, the character he basically repeated in Blades of Glory, but it works well here. This is a savage ... Read more »
Saw
How do you turn $1,000,000 into $100,000,000? Here’s one way: Chain two people at opposite ends of a filthy men’s room, too far away from each other to touch. Tell one of them the only way he can get out is to kill the other. Add plot complications. Ta-da! A gigantic movie franchise in the torture/dismemberment/horror genre is born. As I write this Saw IV is ... Read more »
RV
Here’s about half of a funny movie. The funny parts mostly are physical comedy. The not-so-funny ones are where Robin Williams seems to be improvising. His routines were funny for about a decade, but now they’re getting tiresome. And this movie has to contend with a big obstacle as soon as they crank up the engine of that big ol’ RV: National Lampoon’s Vacation. ... Read more »
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
I’d intended to rent the first of these (of which there are now 3, one in theaters as I write this) but hey, one shambling flesh-eating zombie movie is pretty much like any other, right? In fact, there is only one shambling flesh-eating zombie movie, they just file off the serial numbers and re-make it three or four times per year. They vary only in the number of ... Read more »
Poseidon
Here’s something really rare: A re-make that’s actually better than the original. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was what really got the “disaster movie” vogue rolling, though Airport was two years earlier. For a while they were the hottest thing in Hollywood, pretty much culminating in The Towering Inferno. ... Read more »
The Pink Panther
This was what they call a “troubled production.” We started seeing the trailers more than a year before it finally came out, so I assume they were working in the cutting room trying to assemble something funnier than the test audiences saw. You know you’re in trouble when the best thing about a movie is the music, and that music is 44 years old. (By Henry Mancini, and still as good as the ... Read more »
Nacho Libre
Let’s hope this is just a hiccup in Jack Black’s career, because it’s bloody awful. There is probably a funny movie in Mexican wrestling, but this ain’t it. It’s all over the place, slow-paced … frankly, pretty stupid. In fact, I can’t recall a good movie about wrestling at all, and there’s a billion about boxing. The only other one I recollect is … All the ... Read more »
Coneheads
I first saw the Coneheads in Philadelphia, I believe in 1976. I was a guest at an SF convention there, and many of us were gathered in the con suite to watch this fairly new show, “Saturday Night Live.” On the TV Dan Aykroyd comes through a door wearing a very tall stocking cap. He takes it off … and his head is 18 inches tall! People began to laugh, and kept laughing more and more as the ... Read more »
Bug
I don’t think I ever even heard of this one. I don’t know if it ever “opened wide” at all, but they’re sure giving it big DVD play. Blockbuster has a ton of them, all checked out but the one I rented. The cover certainly suggests that it’s a horror movie … and it is, but I think a lot of people will be misled. It’s not about entomology at all, it’s about real horror: paranoia. Personally, ... Read more »
Bewitched
Sounds like a great idea. They’re re-making the TV show “Bewitched,” and they happen to have cast a real witch in the character of Samantha. All sorts of devilment should result. Well, Rumor Has It, the sequel to The Graduate, also sounded like a great concept but didn’t deliver, and this doesn’t, either. It’s mostly the fault of Will ... Read more »