There could be many reasons to eschew the story that Lewis Carroll himself wrote about Alice and her adventures through the looking glass. Alas, Disney’s ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS does not find any of them. There is a perfect madness in that book that the script by Linda Woolverton fails to capture. Instead we… Read More »
BLACK MASS
It is only the smallest of exaggerations to say that there are only two types of scenes in BLACK MASS. One is of James “Whitey” Bulger either having someone executed with a vicious precision, or doing the dastardly deed himself. The other is an assemblage of characters having an extended conversation about what has happened… Read More »
MORTDECAI is DOA
Sneaking into theaters without benefit of a press screening, MORTDECAI is a tragically unfunny attempt at lighthearted comedy. Based on the novel Don’t Point that That Thing at Me” by Kyril Bongfiglio, its efforts at whimsy fall flat, while its attempts to attain the quirky begin and end with the waxy curls of Johnny Depp’s… Read More »
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Tim Burton, wanting to put his own stamp on ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has wandered not just far from the story, but from the very essence of what Lewis Carroll created. Rather than a Wonderland full of terrifying adventures and deliciously absurd whimsy, he has created the Underland, a place of terrifyingly, yet lugubrious, bad filmmaking.… Read More »
TOURIST, THE
THE TOURIST is a leisurely thriller, more interesting than heart-stopping, with an unfortunate tendency to stall. Designed to showcase the good looks and star quality of its Venice locations, and of its stars, Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, it is a picture postcard of a flick. At its center is a bait-and-switch caper devised by… Read More »
RANGO
RANGO triumphantly trades on the peculiar appeal of the well-executed excursion into the grotesque. Channeling spaghetti westerns, Cervantes, Castaneda, and a dash of CHINATOWN as refracted through the visual sensibilities of Dali, it is a fiendishly clever concretion of high- and low-brow in a story that is both vision quest and farce. The eponymous and… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — ON STRANGER TIDES
Sometimes an actor finds a role that becomes his second self, so precisely does he embody it, and so identified does he become with it. William Powell had Nick Charles in THE THIN MAN series. Basil Rathbone became Sherlock Holmes to a couple of generations. Johnny Depp has Captain Jack Sparrow. Unlike Powell or Rathbone,… Read More »
THE RUM DIARY
THE RUM DIARY is suffused with the warm glow of star Johnny Depps deep and abiding affection for Hunter S. Thompson, the writer of the book on which the film is based, and the model for its protagonist, Kemp, played by Depp himself. Its Depps second time playing Thompson, the first being in Terry Gilliams… Read More »
THE LONE RANGER
There may be a way to mix the monumental tragedy of the Native American genocide with a screwball comedy about a well-meaning chucklehead and his mystically addled Comanche sidekick, but Gore Verbinski has not found it in his pretentious and smug version of THE LONE RANGER. True to the Verbinski style, this re-telling of the… Read More »
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO, the latest installment of Robert Rodriguez’s EL MARIACHI series. begins with a bang and barely pauses to catch its breath until its suitably bloody denouement. Antonio Banderas returns as the fastest guitar in Mexico, and I don’t just mean the way he pounds out chords on his stringed instrument… Read More »