Review – The Stepford Wives (2004)

I didn’t expect this picture to be quite as silly as it turned out to be. It isn’t that I needed anything quite as grim as the original, but this went a little too far in the opposite direction. The cast does a good job and all, but the script doesn’t give them too much to work with. You just can’t make a movie about men who replace their wives with robots and have it turn out to be this happy. On the other hand, I should confess that thanks to a DVD glitch I missed a little of the character exposition early on. Mildly amusing

Review – Seven

Style triumphs over substance in this serial killer thriller. Almost everything in this movie – from the killer’s artistic mania down to the cops’ personality quirks – appear to be designed to facilitate the use of murky, jump-cut visuals. The result is something that looks really cool (though upon re-viewing many years later, more than a little dated) but doesn’t pack a lot of substance. Some of the “seven deadly sins” killings have a certain horribleness to them, but even that’s undone when the monomaniacal murderer deviates from his pattern in order to directly threaten his pursuers. The cast features big names like Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey, though it isn’t really a finest-moment for any of them. Mildly amusing

Review – UK/DK

No Jello Biafra here, but plenty of other punk performances. This documentary provides an occasionally-interesting snapshot of the punk scene in London in the mid 80s. Some of the bands featured in performance aren’t all that good, but some of them aren’t too bad. The lip-synching is a little hard to get used to, but maybe it seemed more, well, punk in the days before Milli Vanilli. The DVD also comes with “Holidays in the Sun,” video shot at a concert in 1996 that featured several “old school” punk bands in all their middle-aged splendor. Mildly amusing

Review – The Eyes of Tammy Faye

I honestly feel sorry for this woman. Watching Tammy Fay interact with a camera is like watching your alcoholic cousin – the one who just got out of rehab for the fifth or sixth time – at a family reunion, sitting in the corner and slowly nursing a beer. She’s been bit by stardom several times, and she just knows she ought to leave it alone. But she just can’t. I thought the early footage of the Jim and Tammy Show – especially the puppets – was fascinating stuff. But once the story gets to the scandal that toppled the Bakker empire, it’s mostly old news. However, it was nice that at least the production was reasonably sympathetic to this simplistic woman and her apparent need for attention. Mildly amusing

Review – Queens Logic

It came from the 80s, though with any luck perhaps someday we’ll find a way to send it back there. For the most part this is a set of off-Broadway intelligentsia playing out an empty-headed fantasy about how the lower middle class from Queens must live. It’s also a lot of nonsense about men and their collective fear of commitment. The result is little more than two hours’ worth of soap opera masquerading as something more serious. Not worth it, not even for Tom Waits’ all-too-brief role in the production. See if desperate

Review – The Fog of War

Errol Morris serves up a simple, desultory philippic on the life and times of Robert McNamara. The production is anchored by an extensive interview with its subject, with topics ranging from World War Two to Ford Motors to the World Bank. And obviously Vietnam. I don’t know that I walked away from the movie knowing anything I didn’t know going in, but Morris did an interesting job of putting it together (creative visuals, Glass soundtrack, et cetera). If you really want to have fun watching this, get a group of friends together and take bets on which memories make McNamara cry and which don’t. I also thought Morris should have gone ahead and used the full version of the sequence on the Diem assassination, the cut that appears in the bonus footage part of the DVD. Mildly amusing

Review – The Grudge

Here we have a Japanese movie with American actors and a plot so fragmentary that it barely holds together as an excuse for the hallmark booga-booga shots typical of the latest wave of Asian horror movie directors (indeed, I thought this was directed by the same guy who did Ringu until I signed onto IMDB and checked). As jump scares go, this is pretty good stuff. It’s just that a plot – or even characters that we get to know or at least care about a little – would have added some substance to the shocks. Mildly amusing