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