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Double Jeopardy was one rewrite away from being a thrilling thriller
Not to imply that screenwriting and revision are easy, but Bruce Beresford’s Double Jeopardy is only one rewrite away from being a decent action thriller. The elevator pitch is obvious enough (The Fugitive… but with a lady!), but it truly does have a killer hook: jilted woman – framed for a murder that not only…
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The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty
Intolerable Cruelty is usually found at or near the bottom of Best-to-Worst films by the Coen Brothers: #15 of 15, by David Haglund for Slate #10 of 15, by Ann Hornaday for The Seattle Times #13 of 14, by Andrew Osborne for Nerve You get the idea. But Intolerable Cruelty is the movie for you…
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Songs That Broke My Heart: Hallelujah by John Cale
Conventional wisdom will tell you nobody did Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” better than Jeff Buckley. The few who disagree are likely of the opinion that nothing beats the original. Here’s a third opinion: the person who transformed Cohen’s song into the modern standard it is today was John Cale. As I started to compile songs for…
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James Mangold’s The Wolverine is the right kind of “serious”
I was very pleasantly surprised by James Mangold’s The Wolverine. Everybody involved did the right thing by simply pretending that the appallingly awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine was never made. Marvel Comics continues their (mostly) winning streak, showing everyone how superhero movies should be done. Hopefully soon we will be rid of grimly ultraviolet takes on…
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When happens when you tell the Bush Administration what they don’t want to hear: Fair Game
Doug Liman’s Fair Game is an important movie. The legacy of the Bush Administration’s war on terror comprises many grand injustices: civilian casualties, torture, increased resentment worldwide, eroded civil liberties, et al. In other words, lots of raw material for screenplays. Most treatments of the war on terror in movies so far have been fictional…
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The dreadful Jack the Giant Slayer is soullessly engineered escapism
Director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer is almost unbearably dreadful. It continues a recent trend in the fantasy genre: fairy tails used as raw material for soullessly engineered all-ages escapism. See also: Snow White and The Huntsman and Tim Burton’s appalling Alice in Wonderland. It’s hard to understand how Singer could demonstrate the ability…
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The Matrix Reloaded is the best Matrix movie
Conventional wisdom will tell you there is only one good Matrix movie, and it’s called The Matrix. Conventional wisdom is wrong. The Wachowski‘s The Matrix Reloaded does everything movie lovers claim they want from sequels, and complain that Hollywood so rarely gives them: it expands the cast of characters while still taking care to enrich…
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The Truman Show is a true gem
A true gem. I think Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is part of informal trilogy (with The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Man On the Moon) in which Jim Carrey found a way to channel his manic energy and rubber-face-pulling into dramatic roles, in films that were not only populist, but also critically…
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J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness comes with too much baggage
Long term Star Trek fans may bemoan the fact that the latest films have ejected much of what was previously considered essential ingredients. Gone are the spacey metaphors for what a moral utopian society might look like, not to mention the years of established chronology and backstory. But to old timer Trekkers I say: too…
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Albums That Broke My Heart: Sea Change by Beck
You could throw darts at the tracklist from Beck’s 2002 album Sea Change and each song you hit would be sadder than the last. Hence this deviation in format from our ongoing playlist of Songs That Broke My Heart; call it an Album That Broke My Heart. Beck had always been equal parts folk (Mutations)…
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Scream 4 makes a few half-hearted stabs… at relevance
By the time Scream 4 appeared, over a decade after the original trilogy began, the horror genre had moved on from the ironic, winking mode the series popularized. A character in Scream 4 complains that most horror movies traffic more in outright gore (“I hate that torture porn shit”). On television, The Walking Dead characters…
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Scream 3 is the movie-of-the-book-within-the-movie
The Scream franchise disappears even further up its own backside as the action moves to a Hollywood studio making a movie dramatizing a book relating the events seen in the original movie. We’re invited to take the moral point of view that the book-within-the-movie and the movie-of-the-book-within-the-movie are exploiting tragedy, but it’s not clear if…