There is a litany of inevitables in Steven Spielberg’s version of WAR OF THE WORLDS. There’s humanity turning on itself in a desperate scramble for survival. There are the vistas of CGI presenting hordes of extra-terrestrial killing machines cutting a swath across cities, suburbs and points rural. There are the seething tensions between an emotionally… Read More »
FANSTASTIC FOUR
It’s Ioan Gruffudd for whom I feel the most sorry. He’s a fine British actor who distinguished himself in, among other efforts, the most recent television adaptation of THE FORSYTE SAGA. In FANTASTIC 4, he’s relegated to the role of an earnest, if super smart, beagle. As the first installment of what the studio… Read More »
THE ISLAND
We don’t turn to Michael Bay (PEARL HARBOR) for subtlety. Like Renny Harlin, he enjoys blowing things up real good and usually after he’s sent them careening along city streets at breakneck paces calculated to inflict the most bodily and property damage as possible en route. And so it was with some curiosity that I… Read More »
STEALTH
For a prime example of Hollywood’s dearth of imagination one need look no further than STEALTH, a derivative bit of drivel whose makers obviously thought firestorms and really fast planes are all it takes to make a film worth seeing. It steals in equal parts from Star Trek (TOS: THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER) and Knight Rider… Read More »
BROTHERS GRIMM, THE
The original stories of THE BROTHERS GRIMM were the folk tales that the fraternal pair, linguists by trade (Grimm’s Law of Phonetic Transformation has always made me weak in the knees), collected from the peasants in the countryside of the German-speaking world. They were dark, they were dangerous, and they were unforgettable. Full of archetypes… Read More »
INTO THE BLUE
Hard bodies, blue water, and a passel of music video moments strung together into the running time of a motion picture is what INTO THE BLUE is all about. It may silly, but at least it’s not offensive. The bodies in the persons of Jessica Alba and Paul Walker are taut and toned to perfection.… Read More »
SCORPION KING, THE
To their credit, the people behind THE SCORPION KING knew exactly what they were dealing with producing a movie starring The Rock. No, its not one of the Pillars of Hercules, but rather a wrestling superstar who, now that I think of it, does rather have those monumental proportions. They tailored the script to take advantage… Read More »
JARHEAD
The history of the military film has had several notable eras, from the melancholy of THE BIG PARADE (featuring the divine John Gilbert in arguably his best role) from the post WWI, silent era, to the jingoistic excesses during and just after WWII with such offerings as an iconic John Wayne THE FLYING LEATHERNECKS, followed… Read More »
16 BLOCKS
Think of 16 BLOCKS as Bruce Willis’ transition film. It’s as though now that he is gamely moving towards his golden years, he is also gamely moving beyond the action films that filled his cinematic oeuvre and bedeviled those who had to endure them when he kept making them even after they had reached the… Read More »
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 asks the cinematic question, “Why wander away inconspicuously from the scene of the latest mission when you can speed away at full throttle on the Tiber River?” It’s a spy fantasy and the answers to questions like that, and there are lots of them throughout the needless running time of over two hours,… Read More »
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