Reviews

The most emotionally engaging films get the viewer to hold a vested interest in the characters for their entire running time.  Regrettably, Wonder Boys doesn't quite manage this, but its second half is strong enough to pull the film together. While Steve Kloves' script (from Michael Chabon's novel) is entertaining all the way though, the characters take a while to really stick, and the film's first section is rather cold as a result.  As the audience follows Grady Tripp's voyage of self-discovery, though, we actually come to know him as he comes to know himself, and his relationships with others - in particular his student James Leer and editor Terry Crabtree - really open up.  It is here that the film becomes incredibly warm, and where it wins the viewer over.  A host of top-shelf performances - from Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, and Robert Downey Jr. (apologies to Katie Holmes, but her character is really underdrawn) - certainly help things along.

Normally, films that use a lot of hand-held camera or oddly-composed shots really bother me. Michael Mann's use of the two in The Insider, however, is nothing short of brilliant. This is not a movie. It's an intense, visceral immersion in what it's like to put your future on the line for something you believe is right. The audience does not watch The Insider - it walks alongside the camera as two men, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), put everything they have at stake to make sure the world finds out that the tobacco companies deliberately misled the public over the knowledge they had of their product's effects. It is a raw, powerful, engaging experience, with Pacino and Crowe at the top of their game (as well as a fine supporting turn by Christopher Plummer as 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace) providing masterful compliments to Mann's blistering direction. Possibly the best film of 1999 (jockeying with American Beauty), The Insider is one of the ten best films to take its story from actual events ever made.

When just about everything else comes together in a movie, gaping flaws in the premise can often be overcome.  Such is the case in Frank Darabont's second Stephen King prison adaptation, The Green Mile.  It's not just that it's hard to believe a mob of white people with shotguns would have turned a suspected black child killer over to the authorities in 1935 Louisiana, but this is a questionable plot point to start a goofily supernatural story.  This is not to say that a movie can't be done well if it features a Christ metaphor (E.T.) or a somewhat off-the-wall supernatural happening that even the characters seem to be having difficulty reconciling (Field of Dreams), but The Green Mile does not carry its premise as well, in no small part due to how ridiculous it looks when Michael Clarke Duncan grabs Tom Hanks for a minute and then expels a whole bunch of black things.  (Apparently all illnesses are caused by evil and not, say, bacteria or viruses.)

Regrettably, The Green Mile doesn't quite get past the goofiness of the story.  It has some decent (if obvious) lessons to offer, but they're somewhat obscured by the heavy-handed allegory.  The game cast, led by a strong Hanks and filled out with numerous solid performances, does what it can to make up for that problem - and they're mostly successful, also helped by good cinematography and an atmospheric score by Thomas Newman (though Darabont might have avoided some of the inevitable comparisons to The Shawshank Redemption - not nearly all, but perhaps some - if he hadn't hired the same composer and then allowed him to make half his cues sound pulled from the earlier film).

The film's earnestness as regards the story is almost its undoing, but the cast and crew mostly bail out the narrative shortcomings.  The film doesn't even drag at over three hours, which is impressive.  The Green Mile is truly a best-case scenario for defining the term "elevating the material."

Possibly the craziest Coen Brothers film ever - and coming from the guys who made O Brother, Where Art Thou and The Hudsucker Proxy, that's really saying something.  The titular Fink (John Turturro) is a writer whose hit play catapults him to Hollywood, where he suffers writer's block when he is assigned to a subject he knows little about and isn't particularly interested in.  Fink wants to make a difference, but the studio just wants a wrestling picture.  In the meantime, Fink befriends Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) and unloads his troubles onto him.  The problem is that Fink, though well-meaning, is both neurotic and self-absorbed.  As such, he fails to notice that the Hotel Earle - the creepiest hotel since the Overlook - is the incarnation of Hell on Earth, and his neighbor might just be the Devil.  Meanwhile, the studio head has big pearly gates behind his office window.  The Coens' message isn't quite clear, here.  Fink is left dwindling in writing purgatory at the film's end - the studio will own his work and intentionally not produce it - but why?  Is he being punished for failing to adapt to the Hollywood life?  And do the Coens really mean to depict such a life as Heaven when the characters who inhabit it are all 1940s studio caricatures?  Good performances and armloads of atmosphere make the film solid, but unfulfilling.

I saw this movie for the first time tonight. While I wasn't expecting much out of it, I must say it pretty much surpassed my expectations in terms of how bad it was. Now, when I say bad, I pretty much mean clichéd.

High-tech gadgets that, let's face it, probably don't even exist in real life. People getting up after jumping two stories onto a car (but then when it's needed for dramatic effect, they appear to be injured by rolling through some glass).

The "surprising revelation" or whatever could have been written by a four-year-old. Certainly a four-year-old could have figured it out, as I did, oh, about an hour and a half before it happened. You need only to apply the #1 iron-clad rule of Clichéd Action Thrillers with "Twists," which I won't reveal here in the interest of not "spoiling" this movie.

The one thing I would say this has going for it is it's definitely a date movie. Once you've figured out the end 20 minutes in, you can spend the rest of the running time engaged in other activities.

I can't believe this movie was made as recently as 1984. It's got some laughable acting, not to mention one of the stupidest plots ever. Who would ever ask fat Texas sheriff Joe Don Baker to escort an Italian he illegally arrested in Mexico back to Italy? Not to mention that the title of the movie tells you pretty much nothing about it - in fact, it's about as generic a title for a wannabe action/cop film as I can think of.

I'm glad I only saw this on MST3K with Mike and the bots as a shield. They remark on the female lead's resemblance to Elaine from Seinfeld ("None of them are spongeworthy") and riff non-stop on Baker's weight. This movie probably isn't worse than "Mitchell," but Baker's reputation definitely precedes him here: when his title comes up at the beginning of the film, Tom says, "I wish I was illiterate so I wouldn't have to read that."

I mean, it wasn't terrible in the usual sense of the word, but it's not even close to that good. The story is boring and largely predictable, the acting is okay at best, there are any number of tiny-but-unnecessary subplots, and the editing is terrible - particularly in the "thrilling climax" scene. I didn't know whether to gasp or just burst out laughing at the atrocious editing job. And boy, does that song get annoying fast.

Predictable, bland teenage fare; manipulative to a hilt and never any good. Chris Klein is going to get pigeon-holed into roles like this (see American Pie, which was far better) if he's not careful. I don't think any effort even went into this film vis-a-vis attempting to make it different from the similar films of the genre - if there was, it definitely doesn't show.

"Film Club" is a dead-on spoof of the popular movie "Fight Club," transposed from the world of underground fighting to the world of independent filmmaking.

The filmmakers take Fight Club's trailer (and some other scenes from the movie) and imitate them dead-on, right down to the cinematography. They poke some fun at Fight Club's own conventions (there are so many rules in Film Club that no one can seem to get them down), yet at the same time use lines from that film to set up industry gags (the Marla character tells Tyler, as in Fight Club, that he'll have to keep her up all night - he whips out a copy of Titanic).

A terrifically funny short film, all told.

I've got a good blurb for Whipped: "The worst 80 minutes of film since The Blair Witch Project." I've often wondered why the shorter films tend to be the worst (with the exception of Disney's better fare), since you'd think they'd have a nice, tight story with no lag. But the reason these films are short isn't because they've got a tight story. It's because they've got nothing to them, period.

This movie is billed as a comedy, but it's rarely funny and usually annoying. Brian Van Holt, Zorie Barber, and Jonathan Abrahams play Brad, Zeke, and Jonathan, three friends who meet on Sundays to discuss their "scamming": that is, using pretty much any method to get in bed with a woman, only to (of course) never call them again. All this changes, however, when they each separately meet Mia (Amanda Peet of The Whole Nine Yards), a woman who appears to share all of their interests.

Soon, they all find out that Mia is seeing the three of them simultaneously. Naturally, this leads to arguing among the three over which of them is actually seeing Mia. She says she likes all of them (how surprising!), so they begin to each pursue the separate relationships. Obviously, this is total hell on their friendship - except that for some reason it isn't for very long.

For an 80-minute film, there's really nothing to fill the meager body of Whipped. Brad and Zeke are terribly annoying, and every character in the movie is one-dimensional. Only Eric, the married friend who still wants to be one of the guys, is even a remotely palatable character - and he's very, very annoying.

Peet herself displays a rather limited range of acting ability. Rent The Whole Nine Yards if you want to see her in a better role - the charisma she displayed in it is nowhere to be found here (it would be wasted even if it were). But don't spend a dime to see Whipped. I went to a matinee show for $4.75 and still left feeling ripped off (there were six people in the theater on the opening weekend - sign?). The movie is only occasionally funny and never interesting, poorly written and not directed much better by first-timer Peter M. Cohen. A number of scenes are tacked on, contributing nothing to what plot there is. Cohen excessively meta-references to boot, sometimes an amusing tactic but more often tiresome. This is just a bad, bad movie.

It's not only the worst 80 minutes since Blair Witch, it's probably the worst movie of the year.

Color of Night stars Bruce Willis as Bill Capa, a psychologist who decides to give up his practice after unintentionally pushing a patient to commit suicide. He switches coasts to visit his friend Bob Moore (Scott Bakula), another shrink, in California, but things take an unexpected turn when Moore is brutally murdered and Capa decides to take over his therapy group. At the same time Capa begins a relationship with Rose (Jane March), a mysterious young woman who seems to know more than she should about both Capa and Moore.

Director Richard Rush hadn't made a movie in 14 years when he did this one, and he's no Kubrick or Malick in emerging from isolation. The movie is one hackneyed cliché after another, with boring car chases and exceedingly gratuitous, drawn-out sex scenes. (It's bad enough that March looks about 12.)

Furthermore, the movie relishes giving away its surprises ten minutes or so before it actually gives them away. March plays three characters, and when they are definitively revealed, they could only come as a surprise to someone who wasn't paying attention. And Moore's murder, fifteen minutes or so into the film, is set up for about five minutes before it happens with Moore alone in his office as winds start to blow in and lights randomly go out.

Color of Night is a poor excuse for a thriller, and it doesn't provide any suspense. It's best at providing gratuitous nudity and a rattlesnake-in-the-mailbox scene, which is depressingly its biggest chill, is ripped directly from "The Player." Only someone who wanted to see a lot of Jane March's body would have any good reason to see this movie. D-

The Whole Nine Yards is one of those rare occurrences - a comedy tackling a somewhat darker subject (hitmen, in this case) and still managing to actually be funny. And it is unbelievably funny.

Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky (Matthew Perry) is a dentist living in Montreal with his wife and her mother, both of whom are after nothing more than money. So when Jimmy the Tulip (Bruce Willis), a hitman hiding out from a Chicago gang whose leader he killed shows up next door, Sophie Oseransky (Rosanna Arquette) suggests that her husband go to Chicago, rat Jimmy out, and see if he can collect a finder's fee. But she really wants him dead, so as she as he leaves, she pays a visit to Jimmy and tells him the whole story. Fortunately, Jimmy has a plan too - he's going to let Oz rat him out, and lay in wait for the gang to come after him. However, the whole thing gets significantly more tangled along the way.

The Whole Nine Yards is incredibly funny from start to finish, with a great neurotic performance from Matthew Perry (even if it's identical to all his others) and terrific comedic/straight performances from Bruce Willis and Michael Clarke Duncan. The plot even works well.

I give The Whole Nine Yards three and a half stars. It's a terrific comedy, and a great role for Bruce Willis.

Yet the back of the box that this videotape came in actually describes this film as such a cross: "Amadeus" meets "Rocky". That in itself should have been a pretty big warning.

The film revolves around the retirement of an opera star, Joachim Dallayrac, and his retreat into seclusion to train two young pupils, Sophie and Jean. The former is a great admirer of his work; the latter is a petty thief whom Dallayrac sees promise in.

Most of the movie simply focuses on the training of the youngsters, which is mostly just shots of them singing while Dallayrac watches. There's nothing very fresh about these scenes, and the writing is weak overall. Quotes Dallayrac's companion Estelle, when Sophie arrives at the house: "He's going to end up loving you," and so it's no surprise when he does, and then she loves him too, but then he wants her to focus on her work, and she gets upset, and ends up falling for Jean, who has already fallen for her. It's a recycled plot, to say the least.

The best characters in the film are the bad guys, Prince Scotti, his attendant, and his pupil Arcas, the former two of which strut around like Bond villains and deliver their lines in similar fashion: Scotti, upon first meeting Jean, asks if Dallayrac has told Jean about him, and then utters the immortal lines: "Je suis le prince. Le prince Scotti." ("I am the prince. Prince Scotti.") It actually comes out funnier in French (to me, anyway), but the sad part is that in any event I don't think it was intended to make me laugh out loud.

Scotti has put on a competition that ends up being between Dallayrac's pupils and his own, and since Sophie and Jean are the good guys it comes as no surprise to anyone when they win the day.

The cinematography is good, at least, and the actors do what they can with what they've been given, but the sentimentality inherent in the premise is milked for all it's worth and then some. Sophie's performance and the vocal duel between Jean and Arcas near the end are pretty much the only highlights in what is otherwise a rather flat picture.

If you're not a fan of opera, you're better off skipping this movie. If you are a big fan of opera, you might as well give it a watch, but you're probably better off actually going to the opera, where it's a lot harder to get rehashed ideas like this one greenlighted. (C)

I mean, I know there are, but come on.

Martin and Bertrande got married. Martin was not a very good husband. They finally had a child. Martin left. Many years later, he came back. Or did he?

The premise behind "Le Retour de Martin Guerre" ("The Return of Martin Guerre," obviously) is that someone has returned after many years saying he is Martin and that he has been at war. But is it Martin or Arnaud du Tihl? Bertrande says it's Martin. Martin's uncle says it's Arnaud. Whoever it is seems to know an awful lot about Martin's life, but on the other hand, his feet are a couple sizes too small.

Depardieu (as the returned Martin... or is he?), Nathalie Baye as Bertrande, and Roger Planchon as Jean de Coras, the chief investigator into the matter, all give fine performances, and the matter of who Depardieu really is is in doubt right up until the last, a good sign. It's ironic that a 1500s period piece ends up turning into a whodunit courtroom drama, but it works well. The final ending is a bit of a letdown, but it's what had to happen, so it doesn't take too much away from the picture. (A-)

I'm not sure exactly what to make of the latest Jim Carrey film, Man on the Moon. I can only assume that the film seeks to provide insight into the life of Andy Kaufman (Carrey); show something of the man behind the act. If that's the case, I am also forced to assume that writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski just didn't have much information to work with.

For example, we learn very little of Kaufman's relationship with girlfriend Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love). And as for the film's habit of revealing every single one of Kaufman's acts as fakes, mere practical jokes on the viewer, there aren't many people left who don't know that for themselves.

The main problem with the movie is that much of it is simply recreations of Kaufman's varied acts, from the Saturday Night Live "Mighty Mouse" routine, to different clips from "Taxi," to his wrestling performances with Jerry Lawler. Carrey is an admirable Kaufman, becoming the late comedian so well that one forgets it's Jim Carrey up there. But so what? Anyone going to see the movie is probably familiar with Kaufman's act, and if they're not they probably won't find it that funny.

I don't have much to say about this movie. The basic plot simply runs through Kaufman's life from the time he gets his big break via George Shapiro (Danny DeVito), through "Taxi," which he never really wanted to do, through his (entirely staged) run-ins with Jerry Lawler, and finally through his death. The movie's ending is left intentionally ambiguous. Did Andy Kaufman fake his own death? Is the king of convincing pranks pulling a huge one on the world? Probably not. But it's something to think about as you leave the movie.

Because not much else in it is particularly thought-provoking. B-

We watched this movie in health class as we were to be looking for examples of dating violence. The film (can I even call it that?) has plenty of them. In fact, it's remarkably cliché. Every example we were supposed to be looking for was repeated practically word-for-word in the movie. Not to mention the ending is shown at the beginning, so it's not really much of a surprise two hours later when the ending comes back. All in all, pretty weak, formulaic, and just downright hokey. Still, it's sending a positive message, although that message is kind of force-fed to the viewer at the end of the movie. -

It seems that many people, including most reviewers, consider "The Blair Witch Project" to be one of the scariest horror movies ever and just a darn good movie in general. Having seen it, I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Not only is it not even remotely scary even in the parts where it should be the scariest, but it's unbearably boring and the camera work nauseates.

I'll grant that a film that is supposedly pieced together from random footage shot in the woods is going to have camera work that looks like that, and that without all the aimless walking around and yelling, the movie would only be about 20 minutes long. But I'm sorry, I just couldn't take it. It was hands down one of the few movies I've ever seen where I actually contemplated walking out of the theater. And the only reason I didn't was because I was curious as to what the ending was. But it was almost not worth staying.

Bottom line: not scary, not thrilling, not exciting, not even interesting. Only the acting, quite good for the fact that it was totally improvised, deserves to be commended. F

I had pretty high hopes for "Celebrity" because it looked like it could be pretty good in the trailer. Boy, was I wrong. I don't know if all of Woody Allen's movies are like this (because I haven't seen most, if any, of them), but I just cannot take a movie that says, "Find a few relatively intertwining lives and just pull a random 110 minutes from them and call it a movie." There's no beginning or end, and not even a shot at closure.

Besides, Kenneth Branagh is doing a Woody Allen impression throughout the movie. Was Allen intending to cast himself in this role? Plus you come to hate Branagh's character for being so stupid as to walk out of positive relationships in search of something better that doesn't come.

And Allen is obviously satirizing the TV and movie industries, but he lays it on far too thick and makes it way too obvious. One character remarks how pretentious black-and-white films are (clear self-reference and only funny the first time you hear it).

As movies go, I can think of bigger wastes of time than "Celebrity." But, I have to admit, not very many. D+

"Scream" was praised when it came out for being a fine send-up of slasher movies and a good work of satire. On the contrary, "Scream" is, while markedly witty, woefully under-clever and simply another lousy slasher film aspiring to be more.

Furthermore, like many films of its ilk, "Scream" is not what most people would call scary. It uses guys in masks popping out of nowhere and buckets of blood to create the illusion of horror, but slasher flicks are not "horror." Psychological horror movies like the films of Steven King are true horror movies.

"Scream" does seem to be somewhat of a satire of slasher films, but its problem is that the satire is too obvious, as Kevin Williamson's script delights itself in pointing out "Hey, I'm a work of satire" every few minutes.

At least, unlike its followup, the even less clever and completely un-witty "Scream 2", this movie is at times partially enjoyable if highly unrealistic. In real life, a person who gets stabbed any number of times will probably not be able to still get up and walk around pretty well.

All in all, the movie tries to be something it isn't and shouldn't aspire to be: by making a slasher pic trying to satirize other slasher pics and making it even more bloody than many other slasher pics are, you haven't elevated yourself above them at all. The movie has only one truly great scene that I'd guess was probably lost on most people: when Randy (played by Jamie Kennedy) is watching Halloween and doesn't see the killer standing right behind him, all the time exhorting Halloween's heroine, "Look behind you, Jamie! Turn around!" A gleeful bit of self-reference that provided one of the few enjoyable moments in an otherwise forgettable film.

As one review put it at the time, "Cindy Crawford makes her film debut. Maybe in her next movie she'll make her acting debut." This movie takes a hackneyed premise and makes it worse with lousy acting and stupid action sequences in which people get shot with high-tech gadgets and things blow up. In short, all we've come to expect from the director, mostly since he hasn't done anything else. And can you blame Hollywood for this one? Some models may be able to act, but frankly, I can't name one, and Cindy is no exception. She's basically just a centerpiece and probably the one thing that kept the movie from becoming completely shelved. My guess is even Hollywood wouldn't have made this unless they could get a really good-looking woman as the main character. But basically, this film is absolutely horrible. If you like to make fun of movies in true MST3K style (the sort of thing I've been known to do) then it's okay to see this movie. Otherwise, you should probably skip it.

I frankly just didn't think it was that good. The jokes, as in the case of most comedy sequels (see Ace Ventura 2) are stale and many of the characters are annoying. I still like Dr. Evil the best, and Rob Lowe's impersonation of Robert Wagner was one of the better characters in the movie, but the overdone parody of the original is unnecessary and ultimately tiresome. For a comedy, and one that made more money in its first weekend than the original made in its entire run, this film really should have been a lot funnier. C+

I'll be very honest: I never bought much into the Star Wars phenomenon. I saw the original and I didn't think it was that darn great, and I never saw Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. But Episode I: The Phantom Menace is, simply put, AWESOME.

Sure, the acting leaves a bit to be desired, but it's not as terrible as some would have you believe. And although a few things in the plot are left unexplained, it's nothing so major as to cause you to go "Who's that?", at least not in my opinion. And the movie is, hands down, one of the most entertaining films I've ever seen.

So, I've bought into the hype, finally. See Star Wars Episode I. See it many, many times. Together we can smash Titanic.