When a film is released without a press screening, it never bodes well. Thus, one cannot approach THE BLACK WATERS OF ECHO’S POND with anything but resignation. Yet even for a flick in which the distributor has no faith, the product is abysmal. As a generic slasher film, it is surprisingly coy about its gore… Read More »
DATE NIGHT
One tiny slip from the straight and narrow can have devastating long-term consequences. That’s the lesson that the Fosters (Steve Carrel and Tina Fey) learn during the light-hearted yet deadly escapades involved in DATE NIGHT. The material itself isn’t the most substantial, and there are distinct echoes other flicks, think THE OUT OF TOWNERS, or… Read More »
MACHETE
MACHETE, Robert Rodriquezs homage to grindhouse genre, is a bracing concretion of advocacy filmmaking and raucous hyperbole. In spirit, it is the unexpected successor to the likes of Rabelais, who used giants and satire to bring low the status quo. The giant here is the title character (Danny Trejo), a former Mexican federal agent out… Read More »
NEXT THREE DAYS, THE
Based on the infinitely superior French thriller, POUR ELLE, THE NEXT THREE DAYS is a road kill of a thriller. Flattened beyond recognition as being its particular genre, and with all its vital, life-giving juices mercilessly squished out of it. Whats left is a pulpy mess that is by turns painfully protracted and irritatingly stupid. Russell Crowe,… Read More »
BIUTIFUL
BIUTIFUL is a somber, lyrical, joyous, and troubling tone poem of a film. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has made a haunting consideration of the mysteries of the universe. The protagonist, Uxbal, is a dying man raging against the dying of his light. After a life spent living by his wits from day to day, a diagnosis… Read More »
THE GREEN HORNET
THE GREEN HORNET is not a great film, but it does get one thing very right. It is filled with the exuberance that a kid finds in living through the exploits of his or her favorite super hero or heroine. For all the faults to be found with its pacing, there is something enormously refreshing… Read More »
MECHANIC, THE
THE MECHANIC is slick, stylish, and fun. In short, everything for which an audience turns to an action flick for a few hours of escapist entertainment. Jason Statham again proves that he is the quintessential genre protagonist: cool, efficient, with an ironic edge and credibly cerebral. This last is critical, inasmuch as he is a… Read More »
HALL PASS
There is in the epilogue of HALL PASS a reminder of how gloriously demented a Farrelly Brothers movie used to be. Stephen Merchants hopelessly repressed character is offered the eponymous break from married life and imagines a series of interludes that grow more ridiculous and more dire with a geometric progression that ends in a… 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 »
ONE DAY
ONE DAY is an unconventional love story told in an unconventional style. The conceit of dropping in on them once a year on St. Swithins Day (July 15) to check their rocky progression from the 1980s through to the 21st century is as arch and penetrating as it is effective in stripping the story of… Read More »