Tag: 2003
-
William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying
After watching too many sloppily-made thrillers filling up space on Netflix (including Mercury Rising, Double Jeopardy, and Along Came a Spider), it’s a relief the my next choice, The Hunted, is so solidly made. You really can’t expect anything less from William Friedkin. So why is it so unsatisfying? First, it doesn’t really capitalize on…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Bong Joon-ho’s Salinui Chueok (Memories of Murder)
A police procedural based on a true serial killer case, a rare phenomenon for South Korea in the 1980s. Grizzled detectives chasing down a serial killer is well-trod territory in film, but director Bong Joon-ho approaches it with a genre-defying sense of humor. Also surprisingly effective is its pleasantly lackadaisical pacing that truly takes its…
-
Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone
This from the director of Crumb and Ghost World? The big pleasure of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is definitely that it utterly wallows in a bah-humbug tone, a welcome tonic to the seemingly perpetual holiday season. I write this in June, and I’m afraid to so much as blink, lest the plastic Santas and X-mas…
-
John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale
When it comes to action cinema maestros like John Woo — I can enjoy the the hyped-up action and weirdness of something like Face/Off, but find that the extreme violence and gunplay can sometimes cross the line from escapism into being inhumane. Paycheck, scoring a mere PG-13 from the MPAA, is less violent than most…