[Cue Chandler Bing voice.] Could Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine (opening Friday, November 15, at the Little) be released at a more appropriate time? [End Chandler Bing voice.] We’re still finding victims of the Beltway Snipers, who were apparently picking people off from a distance with the impunity of Mark McKinney’s Head Crusher from The […]
Movie Reviews
Posted inMovies
I Spy with very little mind
The new action comedy I Spy provides some important services and teaches some valuable lessons to the student of contemporary cinema, especially the well-known Hollywood variety. To begin with, the movie’s marketers copied Winston Churchill’s World War II strategy of carpet bombing, opening the picture in what seems like every multiplex in the country, with […]
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Frida gets her freak on
Julie Taymor, the Tony Award-winning director of the stage adaptation of The Lion King, made an auspicious feature-film debut a few years ago with Titus, a visually arresting take on Shakespeare’s tragedy that was the greatest Peter Greenaway film never actually made by Greenaway. When I heard she was helming the big-screen adaptation of Mexican […]
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The truth about Marky
If nothing else, Jonathan Demme’s new movie, The Truth About Charlie, demonstrates a familiar and sometimes entertaining combination of the courageous and the foolhardy — topped off, unfortunately, with the worst sort of Hollywoodthink. Both the courage and the foolishness derive from the fact that the picture is a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 comedy […]
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How to get on Santa’s “naughty” list
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus (opening Friday, November 1, at the Little), a look at the life of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, is another by-the-numbers, end-of-the-year biopic that would probably be fairly uninteresting if it weren’t for the deviant subject matter. Apparently Crane, unbeknownst to his millions of fans, was a sick little monkey who […]
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Killed by television
The hardiest of all the cinema perennials, as its history through the 20th century demonstrates, the horror film thrives in just about any climate or conditions. From its beginnings in the days of the silents through the present time, it has survived even the shocking, very real horrors of a turbulent history: world wars, genocide, […]
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All mobbed up all over
Despite the reiterated assertions from policemen, prosecutors, and the media that the Mafia no longer exercises enormous power, or even exists in any recognizable incarnation, the gangster movie, bless its tough little heart, maintains its devotion to the Mob. That organization provides the model for the history, the myth, the ethos of the form, suggesting […]
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Bondage, sex, and monsters
Whenever a prestigious juried film festival invents a special prize, everyone should take notice. Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine was the first documentary allowed to play at Cannes in over four decades, and it was so impressive, the jury created an award for it to win. In other cases, special award recipients have much darker […]
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It ain’t easy being a spoiled teenager
The suits over at the WB network must be staggering around their offices in shock. Roger Avary’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction takes two of the net’s biggest stars — James Van Der Beek and Jessica Biel — and uses them in family-friendly scenes involving coke-snorting, masturbation, an orgy, and hot […]
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‘Red Dragon’ awakes
The appearance of the new film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, Red Dragon, suggests some odd and complicated ideas about literature, cinema, and maybe ourselves. For one thing, as that rara avis — a prequel which is also a remake (in this case, of a 1986 movie entitled Manhunter, much of which it duplicates) […]
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Another degree of Kevin Bacon
As so often happens in the American cinema, the new movie Trapped, no doubt purely accidentally, strikes a chord that chimes with current events and contemporary media hysteria. In a time when so-called journalists, especially on the 24-hour news channels, positively drool, in their usual manner, over sensational reports of the disappearance, abduction, sexual assault, […]
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Dumb and Dumber for the art-house crowd
Dumb and Dumber for the art-house crowd Imagine Of Mice and Men if George and Lenny were both boobs, The Odd Couple if Felix and Oscar were Norwegian, or Dumb and Dumber without the scatological humor, and you’ll most likely conjure up Elling, one of the overlooked nominees for Best Foreign Language Film in the […]
