Category: Movies
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The Spy Who Didn’t Have Enough Sense to Come In From the Cold
Burn After Reading and the Coen Brothers’ populism
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The Beast Must Have a Problem He’s Not Telling Us About
Friday night I imitated a normal person and left work before dark. I just sat at home and watched movies on AMC, so I guess I imitated a depressingly boring normal person, but still, it beats working. Apparently, AMC runs horror movies on Friday nights, and this week we got: Puppet Master (a reminder of…
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Just ’cause it’s a theme song, don’t mean it’s not true
When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly…
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Maybe I Didn’t Want to Believe As Much as I’d Originally Thought
Somehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed. Of course, if you go see the movie at all,…
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Why So Serious?, or, I Miss the Giant Penny
According to the box office numbers, there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has already seen The Dark Knight. But just in case, I’ll include a spoiler warning: it’s pretty damn good. The movie mentions several times how the Joker and Batman are both “freaks” and outsiders, and how lonely it is to be…
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The Right Hand of Doom
I really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a…
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An Inconvenient Contaminant
I saw Wall-E last week for my birthday (thanks, Rain!), but have been too busy distracted buying stuff and staring blankly at computer screens to be able to write anything about it. It’s so good I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “wonderful.” At this point, it’s a given that any…
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Espinazo
It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some…
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Cine Puro
Memorial Day weekend seemed like as good a time as any to make some progress on the Netflix queue, in the form of a style-over-substance double feature. In one of the special features for The Orphanage, executive producer Guillermo del Toro describes a couple of scenes as “pure cinema.” He’s talking about the scenes without…
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Indiana Jones and the Appendix of the Forbidden Links
My on-again, off-again mind-meld with Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com seems to be back on again, with her review of Indiana Jones 4. The part she describes best is the first scene where (possible spoiler?) Indy runs into Marion: When he sees her, his face shows what can only be described as pure delight, and it’s…
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Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jaded Eye
Watching the new Indiana Jones movie gave me severe diarrhea. Actually, the two events are most likely unrelated, but I wanted to take a cue from the pharmaceutical business and warn of any potential side effects: a small but not insignificant group of viewers reported spending the 15 hours following the movie being frequently and…
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You freaked-out maniac!
The satellite feed for channel 7 went out this Thursday, leaving me “Lost”-less until I can summon the patience to watch the episode on ABC’s website. Luckily, Turner Classic Movies was available to keep me from doing something productive or sleeping, and I got to catch the last 30 minutes of the 1978 classic The…