Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
BROOKLYN’S FINEST
BROOKLYN’S FINEST is an object lesson in situational ethics played without the comforting buffer of impersonal hypothesis. The eponymous cops in question are neither heroes nor villains, rather they are basically decent guys pushed to the limits that have warped their perceptions of right and wrong as considered moment by moment. Not for them is… Read More »
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE is a completely silly premise that the film purveying it has the excellent good sense to not only acknowledge, but also to mock. That premise is three middle-aged guys and a geeky nephew hop into a hot tub that magically transports them back to 1986. The flick also has the excellent… Read More »
LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS
Life is frustrating, exhilarating, confusing, astounding and unpredictable. So is LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, a film with high aspirations and a slightly muddled follow-through. Based on Jamie Reidy’s book “Hard Sell: The Evolution of A Viagra Saleman” and set against the world of medicine as a business, it makes a piquant juxtaposition of Viagra and true… Read More »
BELLFLOWER
In the French language there is a particularly evocative suffix, -atre. There is no equivalent in English, but applied to a color, yellow, for instance, it bespeaks the sickly quality of that color. And it is that sickly yellow that permeates BELLFLOWER, a crushingly dull look at the lives of crushingly dull people, two of… Read More »
PROJECT X
A man and his son have a significant moment as a crane lifts the formers Mercedes from the family swimming pool. How the car got there, and the impact of how it got there on the relationship that father and son will have with each other and with the world at large from that moment… Read More »
SPRING BREAKERS
What is most interesting about Harmony Korine’s SPRING BREAKERS is the way it turns its imagery on its head while revealing harsh truths about the hollowness of American pop culture. Though the camera revels in shots of decadent excess, it never quite reduces them to mere cheap exploitation. Instead, by the end of this anti-fairy… Read More »
SEX TAPE
The protagonists of SEX TAPE are a happily married couple, deeply in love and deeply committed to one another and their two kids, but, after 10 years or so of marriage, the fiery passion they enjoyed in the first flush of lust/love, and before discovering how versatile a ladys lady parts are, has become a… Read More »
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE is a great idea for a movie. Unfortunately, its fine direction by Alan Parker and excellent acting from a cast headed by Kevin Spacey is undercut by a script that would, charitably, receive a C+ in Screenwriting 101 for Charles Randolph. How it made it to the big screen in… Read More »
REAL CANCUN, THE
THE REAL WORLD, for those of you not tuned into all things MTV, is a reality show on that network that pits, er, puts several college-aged kids together in luxurious digs for four months and lets us watch what happens. THE REAL CANCUN is the same concept and done by the same producers, Mary Ellis-Bunam… Read More »