CONTRABAND is based on the award-winning Icelandic flick REYKJAVIC-ROTTERDAM, and it is directed by the star of that film, Baltasar Kormakur. The setting has been changed from the cold North Atlantic to the sultry climes of New Orleans and Panama. The lead is now played by Mark Wahlberg. Yet the reason for the remake is… Read More »
TOTAL RECALL
TOTAL RECALL is a pleasant revisiting of Philip K. Dicks short story, I Can Remember It For You Wholesale that also, and with a whole heart, acknowledges its cinematic predecessor of the same name. While that version was plastic and kitschy, not unlike its star, Arnold Schwartzenegger, this one takes a grimmer view of a… Read More »
UNDERWORLD
A film, it should be noted, is more than just its art direction, a lesson that the makers of UNDERWORLD, alas, did not heed. While there was obviously much care taken with the color scheme, film exposures, and a consistant visual blast of post-industrial decaying decadence in both sets and costumes, little attention was paid… Read More »
VAN HELSING
VAN HELSING is a film that does not do things by halves. One might, in principle, admire the way it pulls out all the stops early on, but the results, a hemorrhaging husk that eventually dissolves into the same sort of dust as the staked vampires that people its running time, prevents admiring it in… Read More »
UNDERWORLD EVOLUTION
I blame the CSI-ing of the culture. Why else would UNDERWORLD EVOLUTION have a scene in which vampire corpses, sheathed in body bags, are taken to a ship docked at a suitably foggy pier, and autopsied? Scalpels, draining tables, the whole deal, not to mention animations of things going on in the bodies of the undead. Pondering that,… Read More »
CLICK
Having been roundly castigated for MR DEEDS, his attempt to remake a classic film, Frank Capra’s MR DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, Adam Sandler has taken a more oblique, but no more successful, approach to remaking A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Instead of the Yule Season, it’s the Fourth of July. Instead of a miser who shuns humanity,… Read More »