Category: 3 Stars
-
Gritty, Grimy, and Graffitied: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Plenty of genre movies have been set in New York City, such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (devilry on the Upper West Side), Walter Salles’ Dark Water (ghosts on Roosevelt Island), Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic (vermin in the subway), and Spike Lee’s Inside Man (thievery on Wall Street). The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,…
-
The Mutant Menagerie: X2: X-Men United
In retrospect, the first X-Men movie did an incredible job of managing the introduction of a wide array of characters to mass audiences likely unfamiliar with the decades’ worth of continuity established in its comic book source material. But the sequel X2: X-Men United crowds the stage with too many new faces in addition to…
-
A Problem With the Whole World: Dennis Hopper’s Colors
Dennis Hopper’s Colors may be a buddy cop flick on the surface, but it’s hardly typical high-concept Hollywood material. It does have a token overarching plot (involving a mismatched pair of cops tracing the perpetrators of a drive-by shooting), but it’s merely a loose thread to hold the movie together. If neither a character study…
-
Answering Questions With More Questions: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Put simply, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is a clip show done right, albeit in disguise as an original movie for television. Whatever else its intended purpose, it must also do double-duty as a kind of coda, appendix, or postscript to the celebrated television series (2004-2009). But is it one final cash-in, before the sets are…
-
Drew Barrymore’s Whip It skates around conflict
Writer Shauna Cross and director Drew Barrymore’s Whip It is frustratingly averse to dramatic conflict. Rather than finding resolutions, or allowing issues to evolve in interesting ways, it skates around nearly every incident: Bliss’ (Elliot Page) love interest at first appears to have cheated on her, but in fact didn’t, so the worst you can…
-
Before the Fall: The Caprica SyFy Series Premiere
The recently concluded television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was critically acclaimed and much beloved by a relatively small group of fans and critics that appreciated the brainy show’s bleak, pessimistic view of humanity. It will certainly live forever as a classic achievement in television, but the common consensus is that it failed to reach the…
-
Laurence Olivier wrestles Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil
Franklin J. Schaffner’s The Boys From Brazil is one of those they-don’t-make-them-that-way-anymore that I miss: the paranoid thriller that blends sci-fi with politics. I’m thinking Coma, The Manchurian Candidate, and Jacob’s Ladder. It’s often a fool’s errand to complain about plausibility in genre flicks, but I think internal consistency is a reasonable baseline. So I’m…
-
The Pod People Film Festival: The Faculty
We interrupt this retrospective look at the four official feature film adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers with a kind of bonus track, a remake in all but name, Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty. It may be a touch campy, but hugely entertaining. All four official versions are deadly serious, so it’s refreshing for…
-
The Pod People Film Festival: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Philip Kaufman’s re-imagining of Don Siegel’s 1956 classic paranoid nightmare Invasion of the Body Snatchers immediately signals its uniqueness with a strange and beautifully abstract opening sequence. Psychedelic spores float off the surface of an alien planet, traverse through outer space, and fall to Earth as gelatinous rain. A glimpse of a newspaper headline describes…
-
Sass and Kick Ass: James Bond: Casino Royale
Paradoxically for one of the freshest James Bond films ever made, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006) is actually the third adaptation of the character’s debut in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel. After a largely forgotten 1954 TV movie in which “Jimmy” Bond was awkwardly Americanized, the same premise was parodied in a 1967 farce bearing the…