If you remember what the folks at PIXAR did with a pair of Luxo lamps and a bouncing ball 20 or so years ago, then you know that these animation wizards have an uncanny ability to imbue to the most unlikely of inanimate objects with a complex emotional life. Two decades on, a state-of-the art… Read More »
MEET DAVE
MEET DAVE would be entirely harmless if it weren’t for the perfunctory feel of it all. Murphy is not the physical comedian necessary to pull this off, and without a solid script to back him up, it’s got nothing to recommend it except maybe that actor in a frogman suit clinging madly to a giant… Read More »
STEP BROTHERS
Will Ferrell makes two kinds of silly comedies. There are the silly ones that are very funny, BLADES OF GLORY comes to mind, and then there are the silly ones that are wretched. KICKING AND SCREAMING comes to mind. STEP BROTHERS falls, alas, into the latter category. It is a one-joke film dreamed up by… Read More »
SWING VOTE
No, it couldn’t actually happen, but that doesn’t stop the plot of SWING VOTE from being an irresistible idea. A presidential race comes down to one vote, and that vote belongs to a guy who isn’t quite sure who’s running for office. As a matter of fact, voting not only wasn’t his idea, it wasn’t… Read More »
TROPIC THUNDER
The problem with making a satire about Hollywood is that the real thing, ego-and money-driven to the point of madness, is so much more absurd than anything writers can come up with. TROPIC THUNDER succeeds as a brilliant piece of inspired lunacy because it doesn’t try to top reality, instead it reflects it with just… Read More »
THE ROCKER
Rainn Wilson brings his particular brand of prissy, tightly focused outrage to the large screen in THE ROCKER, an uneven film with moments of wacky physical humor that mostly work, obvious lobs at the music industry done fairly well, and a soundtrack that is to die for. The effort may veer off the rails into… Read More »
THE HOUSE BUNNY
THE HOUSE BUNNY is yet another variation on the theme that it’s always better to be yourself. Only better. Of course, that takes a broad swath of heavy make-up, push-up bras, and platform sandals of dizzying heights. It’s a mixed message designed to sell what it purports to subvert, also known as having it both… Read More »
BURN AFTER READING
It is a suitably perverse twist that the only person who has the clearest idea of what’s she is doing in the Coen Brothers latest offering, BURN AFTER READING, is Linda Litzke, the inadvertent femme fatale of the piece played by the miraculous Frances McDormand. Not the CIA operatives, not the Treasury Department guy, not… Read More »
THE WOMEN
Some films are very much the product of a particular time. They reflect the sensibilities, the anxieties, and the dreams of that time and of no other. The remake of THE WOMEN is that kind of film. Unfortunately the zeitgeist it represents is that of the early 1970s, attempts at snappy dialogue hearkening back to… Read More »
GHOST TOWN
GHOST TOWN is a film about ghosts, but the focus is not on the afterlife. No, it is firmly in the life of here and now. The ghosts that populate the film are still all too caught up in the lives of those that they have left behind to move on. Unfortunately, for everyone involved… Read More »
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