Reviews

Metacritic gives this movie a 24, so far down in the red zone it bleeds all over the page. The Metacritic users give it like a 7.6, lots of green all around, and a bunch of 10s. When that happens, you know it's time to say SCREW THE CRITICS. I wonder what it's like in those ivory towers that gets your head twisted completely around sometimes and you not being aware that you're looking down at your ass instead of your beer gut.

This is a fine movie, one of the best buddy-cop movies ever made, carefully exploring bigotry and intolerance, and acceptance and redemption, and altruism and compromise, all in a setting that imposes some fantasy over reality -- but reminds us that reality has surprising twists and changes in it when pressed by the relentless force of time. The ONLY criticism I have is that in Hollywood there is a subtle campaign to make the F-word as common as "hello". They lose a lot of people that way. The F-word is one that is commonly used in its exclamatory sense for strong, forceful emphasis, and overusing it is like ending all your sentences with an exclamation point. When you hear some guy using it in every breath, you know he's insecure. Which accounts for its excessive use in Hollywood.

I was very impressed with Joel Edgerton as Jakoby, and will follow his career with interest. Will Smith did his usual fine job, and the ladies supporting the leads were good as well. All in all a fine movie.

I don't know how Netflix makes money on a $90 million budget, but hats off to them for creating a constant stream of good originals. Movies are so much better now than they were fifty years ago. And I think it is entirely attributable to not treating the audience as a bunch of drooling idiots. The trick is to work smart but in a way that brings along the droolers. Shakespeare taught us that.

I've watched this movie a number of times since shortly after it was released, and my appreciation for it has declined over time. Huston not only directed but wrote the screenplay, so you know going in it's no fool's work. He tried to do something more serious more serious than a James Bond movie. By piercing the gray exterior of Soviet life, it disrupted some stereotypes and assumptions that our propaganda had created, such as not being able to enter a country like the USSR without being detected, and that Soviet officials were boring bureaucrats who weren't corrupt high-livers, and that criminality was not widespread in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. The problem is that Huston just made up a lot of stuff, or made it look as though he had in a rather clumsy way, and couldn't resist some completely implausible James Bond touches. Thirteen years later "Gorky Park" improved considerably on this groundwork, though not without similar errors. For pointing the way, though not for his own offering, Huston deserves credit.

I think of myself as fairly critical when it comes to comedy, because if I am not amused or laughing out loud in the appropriate places, I can't fairly call it funny. And I hate improbable and implausible plots. This movie is engaging throughout and is very funny at the key points. Admittedly, you want to bitch-slap the boyfriend for his stupidity, but let's face it, a lot of young guys are stupid when it comes to their girlfriends. And even that distraction works this for this film: It is, most of all, a great comedy role for its female star, Penelope Ann Miller, and this is the movie that made me a big fan of hers. Miller and William Forsythe are fine actors and have done as well for the viewing public in the 20 years since as they did in this film. And I am grateful to them for giving us a movie I like to watch every couple of years because it's that good.

It says that they spent $56 million making this movie, and $54 million of it must have been for the salary of the star, the otherwise estimable Dwayne ("The Rock") Johnson. The production values are too cheap to explain a big budget, and only that much money could have tempted this star to have appeared in this stinker. It is about grievances of the hero expressed in mindless, unnecessary violence, much of it committed by the hero in plain violation of the law, as often as not with him guessing about the rightness of his action. He's actually a vigilante, not a hero. In the end the bad guys were vanquished, all right, but that is almost a coincidence resulting from the maelstrom of general violence. This is a movie that purports to be about right and wrong. If there is any virtue in this movie at all, it is that it teaches, by opposite example, that how you go about being victorious matters. There is a right way to do these things, and this movie shows the wrong way. The original version of this movie was very careful to show the right way, and made a case for nonviolence as well. This version betrays both those values. Don't let your kids watch it.

I'm going to use the word "interesting" a lot here. This is a character study of a hustler and an interesting young woman. The story is interesting because it's not easy to figure out what she is doing with this guy, and it's not until the end that you see that her motives may be complex. Sex is not always entertaining, but in this story it is part of the mystery of the characters, which is interesting. I thought the dialogue was good, natural and at times amusing. The denouement was understated, which was very appropriate to the low-key unraveling of the plot. In short, this film has added an interesting story about life in New York at this time of the world. I'm glad it's part of the literature.

I admit it -- I'm a total sucker for this movie for all of the right reasons, and some of the wrong ones (like, it's very touching to me that Bruce Paltrow made this movie with his daughter Gwyneth and died a year or so later). Having Huey Lewis in the movie and singing a few of his monster hits is a plus all by itself, and it turns out he can actually act decently. The Paul Giamatti - Andre Braugher duo, both in terms of plot, their excellent acting, and their blow-you-away singing performance, is something I never tire of seeing, and I've watched this movie five times and have it on disk. The plot is superficially pedestrian but actually very engaging and psychologically legitimate despite the displays of craziness by the characters. People do get crazy and do that kind of stuff. As for Gwyneth Paltrow, there seems to be no role she can't get into and occupy with beautiful effect.

This was never intended to be a Great Movie. It was a nice little story, made into a very fine, charming, stick-to-your memory movie with talent oozing out the corners. People who rate it mediocre are just not seeing the pearl for the oyster.

Let me begin by saying I am just astonished to see the low average of viewer comments for this splendid movie. I just have to figure the commenters are a bunch of Yankees who never set foot in the South and have no feel for the slow, quiet humor that this fine film represents.

But even that cultural adjustment doesn't explain the complete failure of these other reviewers to appreciate a really finely drawn comedy, from beginning to end. This is a wonderful work by the fine writer and director Robert Benton, who defies the axiom, Comedy is hard. He makes it look easy.

What he did was simple, looking back, but so very hard for most people to do: He set up a funny plot and kept it funny from one scene to another, by keeping it low key and letting the characters carry the humor lightly, one slightly ridiculous moment after the other, thus avoiding the great comedic danger: You can kill comedy by overworking it.

Benton takes a plausible story about some Texas corruption and discovered maps with some amusing twists to it and jacks it up with some great dialogue and some fine actors -- mostly Southern, as it happens: the fine actor Rip Torn (birth name, Ripley J. Torn, Jr., Texas) and Kim Basinger (Alabama). Robert Benton himself is from Waxahatchie, Texas, and wrote the screenplay with full knowledge and confidence of the plausibility of the plot and the reality of his characters.

Folks, I know lots of people like these characters. So do you. Good people, simple people, women who on the phone who soon ask, How's yer Mom 'n 'em? And Benton has given them a moment of great adventure and humor.

A few gems: Jeff Bridges: "I'm not in the Vernon Darlin' business anymore." Basinger naming her early fetus Doris Isabel and talking to her. Rip Torn: "Why is it you work your butt off all your life to get ahead and it takes two nitwits about ten minutes to screw the whole thing up." And in her most glorious beauty, Glenne Headley as the girlfriend, full of Texas spunk.

I truly pity the Yankees and Californians west of Bakersfield who cannot see the beauty of this film. But you know what? We don't need you. This movie is like Elvis. It will live forever.

I confess that I am a Martian -- that is, a male with a love for logic, action and success. We males got that way because it was up to us to go over the horizon looking for food and if we couldn't find our way back to the tribe, we died alone. While action was involved, it was the power of the mind that got it done. OK, women had minds, too, and many of them had these same skills, though it's clear they evolved other, very Venusian, characteristics as well. The life of the mind is full of mystery and excitement, because it directs every action of the body.

"The Race for the Double Helix" (the title by which I will always know it) is the most exciting intellectual adventure I have ever seen depicted on film. The prize is great, the pursuit desperate, the clash of egos titanic, the drama and suspense fingernail-chewing. I especially commend the author for his treatment of Rosalind Franklin, whom most now recognize as the third discoverer of DNA of equal importance to Crick and Watson. This movie is full of excitement while being true to the history. It's a thrill to watch it.

This movie to me lacked only one thing: a substantial advertising budget. If it had received one, I think it would have sold a whole heckuva lot of tickets. I liked it that, while it had to do with serial killings, it got the enormity of those crimes across in visual but not overly graphic ways. I liked it that it takes a while to figure out what is going on, and then it's a chase, but one with a different kind of tragedy at the end, involving one of the good guys, which was touching. I liked it that they took remote viewing seriously; the CIA certainly did! The film's depiction of the process is very accurate, according to the documentary I saw on the process not long ago. Given the unusual subject matter, there were almost no implausibilities. The movie was well cast and acted. Thumbs up!

This is a fine movie, for the right demographic, namely the same kids who liked the "Spy Kids" movies and for exactly the same reasons: outstanding production values, lots of cartoon-like action, lots of imagination in all of that, and good work from the actors. Jamie Kennedy has got what it takes for natural, charming, comedic acting. Natalie Traylor was more vivacious and cute in this movie than she has been since she took over the sidekick role in the "Monk" TV series. The dialogue has some pretty zippy stuff in it, and the plotting is competent and a good springboard for the hot visual effects.

The only negative thing I can say about the production itself was that the voice of the masked Tim was surprisingly subdued. It needed to be much more out there, distinctive and penetrating, even annoying, but definitely more audible and spooky that what we got.

Still, this is a great movie for kids from 5 to 15. Surprisingly, it totally tanked at the box office (in Hollywood terms -- it lost big money, though it grossed $17 million). This must have been because it was not marketed for kids. In fact, I don't remember much marketing at all on this movie, which is strange for a flick that cost almost a hundred million dollars to make.

But it's too good a movie not to have legs with the nippers in the years to come, if someone will just tell them about it. As we move steadily into the era of DVD importance in viewing habits, greater revenues for initially neglected movies like this one will start to materialize. Sort of like the mask in this movie, they will hang there for a while and then, when the right person touches them, will come to life.

I first encountered the Ali G character a few months ago in the American import of his interview show in which he sets up unsuspecting celebrities and creates comedy at their expense. Since they are invariably people who feed on public attention, it is entirely appropriate to feed on them once in a while. But it takes a seriously misleading, confusing and outrageous character to pull it off, and Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) does it. Cohen thinks funny; Ali G is a hugely funny creation, in much the same way that another wild and crazy guy, Andy Kaufman, invented unforgettably outrageous characters.

"Ali G Indahouse" is Ali G to the third power, cubed. The plot is suitably improbable, offering an appropriate springboard for the Ali G craziness. I laughed till I cried. The plot twisted around and ended happily, and there wasn't a cliché that wasn't ragged on or a convention that wasn't exploited, and at every turn, the absurdity of the Ali G persona looms over all, ragging on itself and painting everything with its humor.

I like the fact that Ali G is a white middle-class guy who has become a hip-hopper and gone native with it. In that way it's about re-creating oneself and then bumping up against conventional reality, which results in absurdities and humor, some attributable to the pretense of the invented persona and some to the ridiculous conventions it scrapes against. It could be a stretch and unfunny. It works and knocks 'em dead.

Let me now back away from over-analyzing something that looks uncomplicated and isn't, but is hugely funny, and deserves just to be enjoyed. Roll with the humor of that crazy dude. He is a classic.

Doug Wilson