Review – A Beautiful Mind

Actor Russell Crowe and director Ron Howard make a transparent run for the Academy Awards with this lengthy drama about schizophrenic genius John Nash. Hey, it paid off for Howard. Nash’s life makes for interesting cinema, starting with his days as a grad student at Princeton and following him through his career as a professor, his descent into madness, and his eventual rehabilitation (assisted of course by his beautiful wife, played by Jennifer Connolly in another successful Oscar bid). Though Crowe’s performance does a good job of demonstrating his range as an actor, somewhere around the middle of the movie it acquires the distinct flavor of Dustin Hoffman’s appearance in Rain Man (or other similar portrayals of the mentally differently abled). It’s a slick production. It’s a touching tale. Mildly amusing

Review – The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Episodes

Of the two apparently lost TZ scripts shot here for the first time in the late 90s, the first one could probably have stayed lost. It’s a tired little ditty about a woman who can see her past and future enacted on the screen during an art house revival showing of His Girl Friday. That this odd phenomenon allows her to predict her own death doesn’t make the story radically more interesting. On the other hand, the second entry is a bit more engaging. A doctor in 1860s Massachusetts discovers an island of people who’ve managed to cheat death thanks to a serum administered to them by the local mad scientist. Sadly for the reanimated villagers, their benefactor decides to stop administering the stuff when he feels his own death is imminent. The result is a Romero-esque spectacle that would have been something if it had been done as one of the original series episodes back in the 50s. As it was, however, the entertainment value it possessed was dampened more than a little by the decision to sepia-tone most of the shots (for that once-upon-a-time look, I guess) and the fact that zombies have been done to death (pardon the turn of the phrase). Mildly amusing

Review – The Creature Walks Among Us

Jeez, what a bummer of a movie. The first half or so of this picture is a so-so follow-up to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. As in the original, this part features some impressive (well, impressive for black and white) underwater cinematography, not to mention a really fun monster. Some of the pacing is off, though that was true of the first one as well. But then around 40 minutes or so in, the whole movie falls apart in almost every imaginable way. The captured creature requires a tracheotomy, which somehow manages to activate his latent human traits (inside every monster must be an American trying to get out). The change transforms him into a lumpy, Frankenstein’s-monster-esque hulk, which the “scientists” take ashore and pen up in a corral full of goats. In the meantime, the fully-human characters have gotten caught up in a ridiculous soap opera surrounding a … oh, who cares? If the point here is that the long-suffering monster emerges as the best example of the flattery we treat ourselves to when we use the word “human,” then at least that’s a valid argument. But it swiftly gets swamped in dull melodrama. Mildly amusing

Review – The Sum of All Fears

Jack Ryan seems to have taken a turn for the younger, completely out of step with his previous outings. If Tom Clancy really needed a more youthful hero, why didn’t he just cook up a fresh one? This odd and unnecessary inconsistency (along with a couple of others) aside, Clancy fans will no doubt get what they pay for with this thriller. There’s plenty of international intrigue, espionage high jinks, and effects-intensive action sequences. I suppose the destruction of Baltimore by a group of neo-nazis with a briefcase nuke would have seemed a good deal more ridiculous a year or so ago, but now of course it has a certain resonance. The tense escalation that occurs between the United States and Russia in the wake of the explosion (our president under the mistaken impression that Moscow is to blame for the attack) gets a little tiresome after awhile, and it’s resolved in a somewhat incredible manner. But otherwise this is an entertaining representative of its genre. Mildly amusing

Review – Blood Moon

When you’re looking at a straight-to-video horror movie starring Tim Curry, Grace Jones and Leslie Ann Warren, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s going to be some cheap, exploitative crap. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when – in addition to the cheap, exploitative crap – the flick also featured a plot, characters and – wonder of wonders – a point. Sure, the theme here is familiar: the denizens of a traveling freak show square off against the “normals” (Todd Browning, anyone?). But there’s more to it than that. The protagonist’s genes have left her fur-covered, and thus she headlines the show as the Wolf Girl. Tormented by some of the locals who come to see the show, she befriends a loner from town who just happens to have an experimental depilatory drug he’d like to test. Trouble is, the more our heroine looks like everyone else, the more savage she becomes. Stir that in with the show’s exploration of sexual deviance and the plot’s eventual uncovering of the normals’ secret freakishness, and this tale’s a lot more thought-provoking than it appeared at first blush. I could have done without the animal research subplot (particularly the scene where the test rabbit gnaws itself to death), but the rest of it’s as entertaining as your average low-budget horror movie while at the same time going a lot farther toward keeping things interesting. Mildly amusing

Review – The Bourne Identity

Ever wonder what an espionage intrigue movie would be like if they didn’t use the same old formula to churn it out? Well, don’t expect to have that particular curiosity satisfied by this outing. This is standard fare from beginning to end, complete with everything from exotic European locales to expensive car chases right down to cliché dialogue like “we’ve got a black ops agent off the reservation.” Matt Damon is a little too aw-shucks goofy to play an assassin, even one who’s got amnesia and can’t remember who he is or what he’s done. But the production quality is good, the action sequences are entertaining (except for the extended car chase, which is as boring and predictable as most car chases), and the plot keeps moving. And that’s the real beauty of formula-based film-making: you know what you’re getting, and generally you get what you pay for. Mildly amusing

Review – Rollerball (2002)

Is it possible to be disappointed in a movie that you didn’t have many expectations for to begin with? It isn’t that this is a bad movie. In fact, for a brain-dead action flick it isn’t exactly the worst I’ve ever seen. The problem is the original. As heavy-handed and dated as the seventies version was, it still had more going for it than the remake. For openers, the first version featured a sport that was kind of a cross between football and the Roman Arena. Teams fought for the pride of their corporation-controlled city states sometime in the nebulous future. Sure, it turned into a lot of preachy crap about the individual against the state, but somehow it at least managed to seem important. In the new version, the contest appears to be a jump-cut blend of roller derby and professional wrestling. Contests take place mostly in former Soviet republics, and they’ve no apparent significance to anyone besides gamblers and the participants themselves. And though the ads for the DVD plugged a version “too hot for theaters,” I didn’t see much that struck me as too hot for anything (except perhaps for the living rooms of folks who can’t bear bare breasts, and not all that many of ‘em either). If they’d just stuck with the original story and re-shot it with more up-to-date sex, violence and special effects, they’d have come up with a much more entertaining movie. Mildly amusing