GIANT LITTLE ONES is a perceptive, intelligent examination of what happens when unexpected feelings and actions don’t have neat labels. In a time when acceptance of teenage sexuality, at least straight sexuality, has become the norm for most concerned, both parents and their sexually active kids, the question of sexual fluidity can still flummox.
THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR is a sad excuse for an action/adventure flick. Seeking box office gold with pretty good special effects and third-rate writing and failing spectacularly, that failure is in fact, the only spectacular thing happening on screen. This third installment of what was once an entertaining if fluffy franchise attempts to… Read More »
THE COOLER
Love is a funny thing. You cant predict where it will bloom or what havoc it will wreak when it does. Thats at the heart of THE COOLER, another of those quirky parables set in Las Vegas where darkness and light fight it out and the outcome is, well, it depends on your point of… Read More »
SECRET WINDOW
There are many things wrong with SECRET WINDOW, the latest in a long line of failed adaptations of a Stephen King opus. Top of the list would be how ridiculously easy it is to figure out the twist that I think was supposed to leave us gasping. While not an insurmountable obstacle, it is a… Read More »
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
With ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 we learn two important lessons. One, that remakes, in this case of John Carpenter’s 1976 original of the same name, fail, and badly, much more often than they succeed. Two, that Laurence Fishburne has so much raw talent, smooth charisma, and irresistible personal magnetism that he can make even trash like this… Read More »
WORLD TRADE CENTER
In this offering from the fecund imagination of Oliver Stone there is no hyperbole, no bombast, and no vast paranoid conspiracy. Instead, with World Trade Center, he has turned his considerable gifts, and using actual events, to recreate what it was like to be at Ground Zero, literally and figuratively, on the day that everything… Read More »
THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB
At one point during THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, one member of the eponymous club watches another burst into tears and run into another room over an Austenian point. “Reading Jane Austen is a minefield” she opines, and so it is. Not because the subject matter of… Read More »