Review – Daredevil

So okay, I guess after Spider-Man they must just figure that any super-hero crammed into a couple of hours’ worth of movie will be just as good. Guess not. One of the problems here (and it cropped up in The Hulk as well) is that the “origin” sequence had to be done as back-story rather than flowing conveniently into the main plot. But that’s only where the trouble starts. The next problem is Ben Afleck as the hero. This guy seems to lose more charm with each successive project, and considering the short supply he started with and the number of movies he’s made, that’s just not good. Then there’s the Kingpin, an odious white criminal played in this movie by a black man. And don’t even get me started on Colin Ferrell. On top of all that, there’s the hackneyed plot and the ineffective special effects. Really it’s too bad. I kinda liked the old Daredevil comics. See if desperate

Review – The Hours

Three interwoven stories, only one of which was worth a darn. Nicole Kidman actually does a solid job as Virginia Woolf. The plot’s a standard story about a brilliant woman suffocated by her well-meaning but ignorant husband, but it’s touching stuff. Odd, then, that the other two present such awkward treatments of women that they effectively undo the work carefully woven by the Woolf strand. The 1950’s plot dwells on a woman who appears to be emotionally scarring her young son thanks to her suicidal neurosis, and the contemporary plot brings that scarring to fruition when the boy-now-grown-to-a-man, driven by AIDS and ennui, decides to kill himself in front of his own personal Mrs. Dalloway. The final product (again with the exception of the Woolf plot) reeks of gay-man-who-thinks-he-understands-women, an NPR-ish no-really-I-care-about-your-feelings charade that isn’t ultimately any more sensitive to its female characters than the average episode of “The Man Show.” Mildly amusing

Review – Gangs of New York

If only Martin Scorcese had done a better job making up his mind what he wanted out of this movie, he might have done a better job getting it. In part it’s a historical drama with a distinct Luc Sante flavor. In part it’s a largely unsuccessful Leonardo DiCaprio / Cameron Diaz romance, and in part it’s just a great big overblown action movie. It might have worked as any one of the three (well, maybe not the romance), but crammed together the elements just get in one another’s way. And given the amount of space available to fit everything in, the conflict took some doing. Daniel Day Lewis doesn’t help matters much, using a genuinely dreadful Marlon Brando impression to ham it up as the villain. And then there’s DiCaprio as the hero in a revenge plot so silly they should have called his character Inigo Montoya. Some of the art direction is sort of interesting, but even that more often than not ends up undone by the ham-handed direction, the scenery falling victim to the scenery-chewing. The Civil War era history of the Five Points had more than a little potential, but except in rare moments the production doesn’t live up to the promise. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hindenburg

Despite the relatively low loss of life, the conflagration captured on film when the pride of Germany’s dirigible fleet caught fire is dramatic enough to keep this disaster at least interesting enough to make a movie out of it decades later. George C. Scott stars as a Luftwaffe officer assigned to ferret out a saboteur aboard what turns out to be the final flight of the Hindenburg. Various suspects crop up during the voyage, so many in fact that it’s almost a shame when the bomb-planter is finally uncovered. As conspiracy movies go this one has trouble competing with other events that had a slightly greater impact on world events (though I suppose folks in the blimp industry might beg to differ). Still, it’s an entertaining story in a JFK meets Titanic kind of way. Mildly amusing

Review – Freddy vs. Jason

I think they’re on to something here. Next they should pit Michael Myers against Leatherface. Then the winner can play Jason for the all-time championship. They could even have a Seniors Tour and get Dracula to battle Jack the Ripper. Novelty aside, this is more than a little sub-par even by the relatively lax standards set by previous entries in both series. I kinda liked the Freddy caterpillar, but beyond that the effects were uninspiring. The gore was amateurish, and the gratuitous nudity early on didn’t exactly make up for it. Overall the production had a lot more in common with the Friday series than the Nightmare set, particularly in the distinct lack of engaging characters among the victims. I guess I’ve seen worse horror movies, but given this movie’s potential – not to mention all the hype – I hoped for a little more than I got. Mildly amusing

Review – SWAT

I swear these things are being written by machines. Only a computer could pack this many clichés and predictable plot twists into less than two hours’ worth of movie. But hey, why not? Computers do most of our special effects. They’ve even replaced actors in some recent Hollywood successes. Surely writers couldn’t be that far behind. The product of this miracle of scriptwriting technology is an action movie made entertaining almost exclusively by the quality of the gun battles. Guys in particular need to take care to stay clear of football games and weightlifting for at least 24 hours prior to taking in this flick in order to avoid testosterone poisoning. But surprises that wouldn’t surprise a 12-year-old notwithstanding, at least it wasn’t boring. Mildly amusing

Review – A Letter to Three Wives

Against my better judgment I found myself being drawn into this dated drama about three post-WW2 wives musing about their relationship woes. Sure, it’s full of the sexism and racism typical of the period, but there’s more to it than that. Our three protagonists jointly receive a letter from a woman from all their husbands’ pasts informing them that she’s run off with one of their husbands. Throughout a day trip with some school girls the trio is left to muse about their various relationship woes (war bride married above her station, career woman married to underachieving scholar, and gold-digger who actually loves her sugar daddy), each anxiously waiting to find out if she’s the one. Oddly enough, it doesn’t turn out to be quite as misogynist as it sounds. Further, the script is clever and the acting for the most part up to the job. Though I suppose this isn’t normally the sort of thing I’d seek out, I’m not a bit sorry I saw it. Mildly amusing

Review – House of 1000 Corpses

I didn’t bother to count, but I’m willing to bet they didn’t make it all the way to 1000. Unless, of course, you count all the poor audience members who were bored to death sitting through this stinker. This is one of those movies where it’s hard to pick the worst part of the production. The lousy acting? The spastic, bad-music-video editing? The lame excuses for sex and gore? No, though it’s a close race, I think we have a clear winner in the script. The plot – to the extent that there is one – is largely borrowed from other movies that weren’t all that good to begin with, and the dialogue can really only have been generated by the mental and moral equivalent of Joe Eszterhas after someone hit him in the head with a hammer several times. Honestly, this sorry excuse for a slasher movie comes across as writer/director Rob Zombie deliberately making fun of anyone stupid enough to willingly sit through this dull nonsense. Unfortunately, judging by all the hype he’s got a good-sized number of willing dupes. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Quiet American (2002)

Parts of this movie are really good, and parts are more than a little on the uninteresting side. That’s because roughly half the movie is devoted to early 50s political intrigue in Indochina, and the other half is squandered on a thoroughly boring love triangle between an aging English journalist, his Vietnamese mistress and a young American economic advisor who may be more than he seems. Sure, the romance is obviously supposed to be an allegory about the desires of colonialists old and new to possess the inscrutable East, but that doesn’t make the romantic comings and goings any more entertaining than the average soap opera. However, the espionage thriller aspects of the production are more than enough to make up for the sappy soap, especially if you’re like me and you start with at least a little interest in the subject matter. Mildly amusing

Review – Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines

Hooray once again for computer-generated special effects. The robots in this one look a lot less like puppets than they did the first two times around. The action’s also more than a little slicker. And the post-Sept. 11 ending’s sure a far cry from Cameron’s episodes. But somehow it’s as if the cinema gods demand that overall quality be a constant and that gains in one area must be counter-balanced by reductions in others. As a result, the characters are considerably less engaging, a matter that isn’t helped by the drop in acting quality. The script’s also a bit on the weak side. At least the movie itself wasn’t as bad as the ads; TV spots made this look like an action comedy, and as a result I very nearly didn’t bother to go see it. I guess I’m at least a little glad a lazy summer Friday gave me enough incentive to overcome my fears. Mildly amusing