Movie Reviews
1408
I guess you could think of this as The Shining Lite. (Hey, is that a pun?) That movie dealt with a haunted hotel, this one is just a haunted hotel room. (A suite, actually, and quite a nice one before the SFX people get at it.) But that makes it a little more manageable. The Shining was filmed twice, and the problem in the first was ... Read more »
300
Another comic-book movie. Another green-screen movie, shot entirely in a warehouse in Toronto with all scenery CGIed in later, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but with no sense of humor. Based—very loosely—on the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartan Greeks and the Persian Empire of Xerxes. I figure history may have ... Read more »
Invictus
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and in the end he forced the government to let him loose. Most people—myself included—would have been pretty pissed off when they got out. They’d be looking for revenge. Not Mandela. Most people—myself included—figured South Africa would soon descend into race war as the blacks got even for the atrocities committed against them during apartheid. But ... Read more »
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
It’s amazing the dreck you see when you go to a double feature at the drive-in. We’ve sat through some stinkers, but this was the worst yet. If you look at my review of the first one you’ll see I gave it a marginal thumbs up, mostly because it had a slightly new take on the wheezing old vampire trope, and because the idea of being super-powerful and living forever appealed to me. This ... Read more »
It’s Complicated
You see this one mostly for Meryl Streep, and how many times could I have written that line over the last 20 years? Here is another case of a movie that no critic got very excited about, but few actively hated. It scored a perfect 50% at Metacritic. It cost $18 million to make and in two weeks has grossed $60 million. That’s pocket change to James Cameron, but a nice little profit for the ... Read more »
Shutter Island
It’s going to be hard to write very much about this. I don’t think it’s any secret that the ending is quite a large surprise, and I won’t say anything more about it than that it is a surprise. But I got the surprise by reading the book, both when it was new and a few months ago to refresh my memory. And while I was watching I was struck that, subjectively, there are two movies here. Sort ... Read more »
How to Train Your Dragon
I expected that this would get about a 50% at Rotten Tomatoes. Half liked it and half didn’t. Imagine my surprise when I saw it had 98%. That just doesn’t make sense to me. There was very little going for this movie, it was so routine you could imagine the scene 15 minutes down the line, you could know pretty certainly which line of dialogue was about to come ... Read more »
The Committments
DIRECTED by Alan Parker
PRODUCED by Lynda Myles & Roger Randall-Cutler
WRITTEN by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, & Roddy Doyle
BASED ON A NOVEL by Roddy Doyle
MUSIC by The Commitments
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Gale Tattersall
PRODUCTION DESIGN by Brian Morris
The Commitments is an artificial band. They were assembled for this picture from the ... Read more »
Green Zone
Paul Greengrass directed some amazing films, including United 93 and the second and third Bourne movies. This one did many of the right things, but it didn’t quite connect with me. It’s a political film, and I applied my sure-fire formula for political movies: If the Wall Street Journal hates it, then the movie is truthful. At ... Read more »
The Road Warrior
DIRECTED by George Miller
PRODUCED by Byron Kennedy
WRITTEN by Terry Hayes & George Miller & Brian Hannant
ORIGINAL MUSIC by Brian May
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Dean Semler
ART DIRECTION by Graham ‘Grace’ Walker
The Mad Max series is a perfect illustration of one of the worst things about most films that have a Roman numeral after them, ... Read more »