Category: 3 Stars
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Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Even if the marketing hadn’t trumpeted the dramatic return of burnt-out Hollywood high-concept screenwriter Shane Black, it’d be painfully obvious Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a movie crafted specifically for the audience he practically created with his Lethal Weapon quadrilogy. The all-over-the-place plot leaves a few threads dangling (What happened to the whole Michelle Monaghan…
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Orson Welles’ F for Fake is part documentary, part essay, part practical joke
F for Fake is Orson Welles’ last completed movie: part documentary, part essay, part practical joke. Welles portrays himself much as one might imagine him: a robust raconteur settled in for the long haul at a good restaurant, surrounded by educable pretty young things, eating and telling tall tales with great relish.
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J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III is preposterous and exhausting
A few disconnected thoughts on J.J. Abrams‘ Mission: Impossible III: I rue the day Terminator 2 (aka “T2“) came out and was a big hit; now every pre-ordained blockbuster comes abbreviated: ID4, LXG, AVP, X2, X3, and now of course M:I:III. Like most summer action blockbusters, M:I:III is at first enjoyably preposterous but quickly becomes…
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Fascism by Common Consent in James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta
For all the negative buzz regarding V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore’s total disavowal of James McTeigue’s adaptation, I was surprised to find that the film kept far closer to the book than I expected. Closer, in fact, than the two other travesties of Moore’s comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Perhaps not…
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Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
As Bubble‘s loos into the lives of factory workers in an economically depressed town turns into a noir (as Steven Soderbergh himself notes on the commentary track), I caught a whiff of class anthropology. That said, I understand Soderbergh’s point that critics’ charges of exploitation are condescending; the non-actors are intelligent human beings who wholly…
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Kelly Macdonald and Bill Nighy bond over extreme poverty in The Girl in the Café
Richard Curtis and David Yates’ The Girl in the Café, a BBC movie aired in the US on HBO, was incredibly cute, and my heartstrings were indeed pulled, but I couldn’t shake the sense the love story was mere dressing for the real purpose of the film: explicating the issue of extreme poverty to help…
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King Kong (1933)
The original 1933 King Kong gets points for being so drenched with subtext you can swim in it. But whenever Kong isn’t on screen it’s dreadful.
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Shaun of the Dead
For most of it, I thought for sure Shaun of the Dead was a four-starrer, but it lost its way at some point. I’m not sure exactly of the transition point, but I felt that the tone had changed too drastically by the time the characters were trapped in the pub (in other words, I…
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Sid & Nancy
And now to raise the gander of another friend. Sorry, Kevin, but I’m still not much of an Alex Cox fan. I can’t say that Sid & Nancy, his look into the lives of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, spoke to me. But no doubt, Gary Oldman is superb (the degree to which he disappears…
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11’09″01 – September 11
11’09″01 – September 11 is a portmanteau film comprised of shorts inspired by or in reaction to the September 11 attacks, made by directors from nearly every continent. At first, I thought for sure I would be giving this one more than three stars, but the quality of the short films takes a steep dive…