Category: 2 Stars
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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…
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Scream 2 is a self-fulfilling prophecy
There’s nowhere else the Scream franchise could have gone other than here: an ironic, self-aware sequel to an ironic, self-aware horror film. When one the characters states “Sequels suck! Oh please, please! By definition alone, sequels are inferior films!”, it’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a fine line between winking at your audience and…
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This is 40 was made by comedians, for comedians
Because you demanded it: a sequel to Knocked Up! Oh wait, you didn’t? Neither did I. Even as an admitted “dramedy”, Judd Apatow’s This is 40 is a major bummer. Laugh and cry as you watch a couple deal with the same problems ordinary people can relate to: what to do with their rewarding jobs,…
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Batman: Year One copies the comics but doesn’t capture what made the them classics
The film buffs at Criterion Cast recently took a break from their usual discussion of the likes of Ozu, Godard, and Cox for in their year-end podcast review of the 2012 year in movies. Rather surprisingly to me, they talked up Batman: Year One and Dredd as two underrated 2012 releases. I had been happily…
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Planes, Trains and Automobiles is astonishingly unfunny
I’ve been catching up on my John Landis, for better or for worse. Trading Places and Coming to America are both much better than I remembered, and I’m glad I revisited them. But Planes, Trains and Automobiles is just astonishingly unfunny. A slapdash production, clearly banking solely on the presumed charm and appeal of its…
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Sad Dinosaurs: Calling Bullshit on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
As a public service, I will now summarize all 2 hours and 19 minutes of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life for you: My mommy was pretty, my daddy was mean, sometimes kids die, I inhaled too much DDT, and it makes me so sad. Sad like the lonely birth of the lifeless universe. Sad…
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Terminator Salvation is oppressively feel-bad apocalypse porn
Terminator Salvation was released in a year curiously rife with apocalypse porn. The visions of world’s end in theaters that year varied wildly in tone: everything from illuminating art to alarmism to escapism. The competition to bum you out included Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which utilized the best special effects technology money could buy to ritually…
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Action Figures: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands in despair that the well of source material for movies has dropped this precipitously low, to the level of plastic action figures. To be fair, trash (escapist or just plain trashy trash) has existed since the very first days of the medium. But cinema’s early conception as a…
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Mummy’s Boy: The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Perhaps it was the mood I happened to be in the day I saw it in 1999, but I will freely admit I loved The Mummy, the first film in the latter day incarnation of the 1930s MGM horror franchise. In concert with Simon West and Jan De Bont’s pair of Tomb Raider films, The…
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Vin Diesel is a Man Alone, in Babylon A.D.
Vin Diesel has made something of a specialty in dystopian science fiction movies, possessed of astonishing visuals but horrifically bad scripts. I’m looking at you, Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick) Does he seek these kinds of projects out, or has he been typecast as a weary but action-ready man of the future? Mathieu…