GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE begins with a lonely Kong suffering the pain of an infected tooth, and the loneliness of being the last of his kind. It’s a good place to start, and if the filmmakers had stayed with the big guy on his adventures, this would have been a much better flick.… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — ON STRANGER TIDES
Sometimes an actor finds a role that becomes his second self, so precisely does he embody it, and so identified does he become with it. William Powell had Nick Charles in THE THIN MAN series. Basil Rathbone became Sherlock Holmes to a couple of generations. Johnny Depp has Captain Jack Sparrow. Unlike Powell or Rathbone,… Read More »
THE LONE RANGER
There may be a way to mix the monumental tragedy of the Native American genocide with a screwball comedy about a well-meaning chucklehead and his mystically addled Comanche sidekick, but Gore Verbinski has not found it in his pretentious and smug version of THE LONE RANGER. True to the Verbinski style, this re-telling of the… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL
The idea behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is enough to make even the most hopeful of reviewers cringe mightily and reach for an aspirin and an antacid. It’s not based on a book, a play, or even a scenario that can be summed up in one sentence in a pitch meeting. It’s based on a… Read More »
SHREK
As a pleasant reminder of what youre NOT going to get with SHREK, this animated film starts with the cliché of a storybook fairy tale. Big green hands turn the oversized, tritely illustrated pages of a princess locked in a tower and the brave knight who rescues her and gives her true loves first kiss.… Read More »
DEJA VU
The best thing that can be said about DEJA VU is that it pumped some much needed revenue into New Orleans and its environs. The second best thing that can be said about this otherwise benighted exercise is that by filming a few scenes in the ravaged Ninth Ward of that city, the devastation that… Read More »
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN — AT WORLD’S END
It’s as though the people involved with PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END gave a great deal of thought to where exactly they hadn’t taken their heroes, villains, and Jack Sparrow, who is both and neither. Singapore, for one, and so the sequence in the seamier parts of that location. The polar climes, and… Read More »