Review – The Yes Men

Of all the pedantic liberal “cause” movies I’ve ever seen, this is the first one that really strikes me as funny. Michael Moore (who appears in it briefly) could learn a lot from these guys. Rather than preach or whine or try to push the ol’ Mike Wallace ambush interview, the group who call themselves the Yes Men work up elaborate pranks and play them on unsuspecting but generally well-deserving targets. The main features of the movie center around the group’s trick of using a phishing copy of the WTO website to get invited to speak at international trade conferences. The speeches involve things like managing slaves by wearing a skin-tight gold suit with a giant phallus-like “computer monitor” in the front or concocting schemes for McDonald’s to sell food made of feces to developing nations. Though only briefly covered in the picture, I also got a real kick out of the group’s efforts to swap the voice chips in Barbies and G.I. Joes and put them back on retail shelves. If you have a point to make in the 21st century, this may well prove to be the best way to make it. Worth seeing

Review – Raging Bull

Boy did this one ever give rise to a slew of clichés. But in a sports movie – a boxing movie to be more precise – I suppose clichés are stock in trade. Martin Scorcese directs Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta, making the boxer into an archetypal mook. This is mostly an actor’s picture, particularly with DeNiro’s legendary weight gain to more accurately portray the subject’s physical and mental decline. On the technical side, this features some stunningly good visual work but some of the most aggravating sound mix I’ve ever seen (I hope the blend of whispered dialogue and screaming fight sequences were just a problem with my TV set, because constantly ramping the volume up and down got a little annoying after awhile). I suppose this isn’t exactly the most flattering picture ever made about Italian Americans, and the protagonist comes across as more pathetic than tragic. But overall it’s a great movie. Worth seeing

Review – Game Box 1.0

This movie features the most thoroughly documented delivery of a piece of mail since Spike Jonze's video for "If I Only Had a Brain" by MC 900 Foot Jesus. Once the package finally arrives at its destination – the home of a video game tester who recently lost his significant other – it turns out to be a new virtual reality first person shooter. Do I even need to tell you that if you die in the game you die in reality? The effects are cheap, but perhaps the chunky look was done intentionally to keep the game graphics consistent with what games looked like back then. Though this isn't the worst what-if-games-really-killed-you production I've ever seen, isn't exactly the best either. At least the production is notable for an appearance by The Dish's Danielle Fischel. Mildly amusing

Review – Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Normally I’m not a big fan of the bylined title, but in this case it’s more than justified. A collection of supernatural-ish short subjects from a Japanese director is almost automatically going to invite comparison to Kwaidan, but this one’s pure Kurosawa. The second half of the eight tales tend to be a bit on the emotional side, particularly the thickly sentimental finale. For my tastes the first few are more entertaining, especially the fox wedding. However, all the way through the movie retains the director’s wonderful sense of understatement and ambiguity. Worth seeing

Review – Donnie Darko

When I was 17, I might have really loved this movie. Trouble is, that was 22 years ago. As it was, I thought some of the visuals were interesting. The cast was good. The script was moderately clever in points, but elsewhere it was stuffed full of adolescent anxiety clichés. The end in particular was more than a little disappointing. Overall this was a nice combination of elements, though still I think people (especially mid to late teen boys) with a little more in common with the protagonist really form the core of the intended audience. Mildly amusing

Review – Ladder 49

So let’s see. Cut the interesting parts out of Backdraft, add extra firemen-and-their-families schmaltz, give it a tear-jerker ending, and spit it back onto the screen. Yep, that should make for a good movie. Or then again, maybe not. See if desperate

Review – Collateral

This Tom Cruise / Jamie Foxx vehicle starts with a weak premise and unravels from there. From the outset we’re asked to believe that a professional killer with five marks to slay in the course of an evening is going to waste his time taking a cab, requiring him to terrorize the driver into doing his bidding. There’s some “plans to pin it on the cabbie” excuse, but it’s flimsy stuff. Indeed, this turns out to be one of those annoying, one-track productions in which a constant motion from one tense situation to the next stands in stead of an actual plot. Some of the fight sequences feature some decent choreography (I particularly liked the part where Cruise kills the guys who just got done robbing Foxx). But more often than not even the violence is done in by bad pace and weak editing. Overall this movie earns points for the money they spent on it and not much more. Mildly amusing

Review – What the Bleep Do We Know?

I’ve got a better question for you: where the bleep do they get money for crap like this? I guess if I’d looked a little closer at the box I would have seen Ramtha in the credits and thus known what I was in for before I even put it in my DVD player (or to be more precise, before I even rented it to begin with). The scene where computer-animated cells get out of hand at a wedding reception was mildly entertaining, but the rest of the picture was non-stop new age drivel. It’s too bad scientific disciplines can’t sue for defamation, because if they could then quantum physics would have a hell of a case against the gurus with the temerity to sully a perfectly respectable branch of study by associating it with TM and a half a dozen other equally silly pursuits. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Cursed

Someday someone is going to make a genuinely scary werewolf movie. Until that day, the title of this barker remains an apt epitaph for the sub-genre. Step one for ridding ourselves of this evil spell will have to be abandoning the whole John Landis funny-quirky thing. Next, the werewolves are going to have to not look like big teddy bears. And if Wes Craven is going to play any role in the project, he’s going to have to regain some of the sense of timing he once had. Half this movie plays like it’s in fast-forward. And all the way through this picture comes across as an after-school special about the dangers of getting bit by werewolves. Christina Ricci has a few good moments, but even at her best it’s all too easy to recall that she was once on the “serious actress” track instead of killing time in lycanthropic bubblegum like this. Mildly amusing

Review – The Ring 2

Talk about your boring sequels. This isn’t exactly the first movie to prove that the laconic pace and obscure eeriness of Japanese ghost stories work well within their native cultural context but just don’t translate to the Hollywood horror market. Case in point: the scene in which our protagonists’ car is attacked by computer-generated deer. It’s supposed to be frightening, I’m sure. But it’s just so weird – almost funny – that it falls flat. Likewise with most of the rest of the movie. The script doesn’t help matters, either. It’s one of those jobs where it seems like they picked an ending and then just worked backward trying to make it happen, abandoning logic and believable character motivation along the way. Maybe if it hadn’t been a sequel to a wildly successful picture it might have stood more of a chance. As it is, however, I’m betting audiences won’t think much of it. Mildly amusing

Review – Flight of the Phoenix (2004)

When I first saw this, I hadn't seen the original. So I didn't really know how this one compares. But standing on its own, this is your standard, run-of-the-mill action adventure movie about a group of personality types in a perilous situation forced to work together to survive. The situation here is a plane crash in the middle of nowhere Mongolia (or is it China?), with menaces including sand storms, smugglers, and of course the de rigeur lack of provisions and surplus of interpersonal communication issues. If you like this sort of thing, this is a fairly well-produced specimen. Mildly amusing

Review – Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde

I guess this works about as well the second time around, though as with most leftovers it comes across as, well, reheated. In this round the bete noir is animal testing, and our bubble-headed heroine has gone to work in Washington in an attempt to save her dog’s mother from a cosmetics lab. I was a little less in the mood for this sort of thing than I was when I watched the first one, but objectively if you liked number one then number two should keep you entertained as well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Motorcycle Diaries

Though somewhat cliché-ridden, this nonetheless turns out to be an entertaining and understated (at least compared to most Hollywood fare) portrait of the tour of South America shared by two men: Alberto Granada and Ernesto Guevara. What starts out as a middle-class-kids-road-tripping-on-a-motorcycle experience turns into a profound discovery of the plight of the downtrodden, particularly after the bike breaks down and our heroes are forced to continue their journey on foot. The course of the plot is I suppose more than a little pre-ordained when one of the protagonists later grows up to be Che Guevara. But predictability aside, this is a pleasant story supported by good acting and some spectacular cinematography. Worth seeing

Review – Ray

Ray Charles was a brilliant musician. You don’t have to know anything about his personal life to know that. All you have to do is listen to his music. Nonetheless, I take it from this production that he had some problems with drugs and infidelity. That’s interesting enough, but if I’m being offered the choice between spending two and a half hours watching the seemingly endless pageant of his shortcomings or just listening to him sing and play the piano, I’m going with the latter. I also thought a lot of the editing gimmicks were a little over-wrought, cliché and/or amateurish. Finally, I wish I’d left the extra footage feature off when I watched it on DVD. The extra scenes rarely added much to the story, and the pausing and restarting was more than a little annoying. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Jamie Foxx’s performance. Who would have thought that a guy who made his reputation playing stereotypical goofball roles could do such a solid job? Mildly amusing

Review – The Forgotten

Few times in cinema history has a title ever so aptly described the ultimate fate of its own movie (Woody Allen’s Sleeper is the only other example that comes immediately to mind). Julianne Moore stars as a woman who has recently lost a child, and for some strange reason everyone around her is trying to make her forget that she was ever a mother. “Some strange reason” becomes stranger and stranger as the story goes, until finally we have people simply being yanked away into the sky and disappearing. Some of the effects are kinda cool, understated in a way few big budget Hollywood productions ever dare. But the is-she-crazy-or-are-aliens-messing-with-her plot wears thin long before the celluloid runs out. There’s only so many times you can yank the rug out from under folks before your audience won’t get back on your rug anymore. Mildly amusing

Review – Species 3

Third verse, same as the first. Actually not quite the same, because this one’s even dumber and has even worse production values than the first two. There’s superfluous cat death early on, and things just go downhill from there. This one just barely escaped an “avoid at all costs.” Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Shark Tale

As is the general pattern with Dreamworks animations, this one’s marginally for the kids but features a load of stuff for their parents as well. Unfortunately here we seem to have reached the point where the asides to the grownups have overwhelmed the kid-oriented fare. I guess the average tot would find this entertaining enough, but the real fun of the picture is the references to other (often R-rated) movies. Further impressive is just how hard the animators must have worked to make a bunch of fish look like the actors who supply their voices. Overall this is a colorful yet content-free parade of gimmicks. Mildly amusing

Review – Inspector Gadget

What can I tell you? The remote was on a chair out of my reach, and I was just flat out too lazy to get up and change the channel. I’ll bet younger kids will get a real kick out of this tale of a security guard turned into a cybernetic super-cop. But it’s just too dumb for anyone above the age of ten or so. See if desperate