Review – Doctor Dolittle

Memory is a tricky thing. I distinctly remember enjoying this movie when I was a kid. But after re-watching it, I can’t imagine my pre-teen self voluntarily sitting through two and a half hours of anything this dull. I suppose I must have been entertained by the talking-to-the-animals parts. And the giant pink sea snail was cool in a parade float sort of way. Further, I don’t think I would have noticed the rampant sexism and racism back then (I was a fairly ignorant little kid). But ugh, then there’s the unending parade of musical numbers! With only one or two exceptions, every time a character begins speaking to thin air and the orchestra hits a note, the following minutes could easily have been cut. The result would have been a more entertaining – or at the very least shorter – kids’ movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Twilight

After all the hype, I was hoping for something better than an unpalatable blend of Interview with the Vampire and Barbie Fairytopia. I admit that I am neither 12 years old, excessively moody nor a girl, so I’m clearly not a member of the target audience. Still, I was hoping for at least a little more cool vampire stuff and a lot less disingenuous adolescent sexuality. Frankly, the 30-second bunny version was a lot more entertaining (not to mention somewhere around one hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds shorter). See if desperate

Review – Uncivil Liberties

Yeesh, what a boring movie! The premise might have had some potential. In a not-too-distant future, the whole “homeland security” thing has turned our country into a police state. The resistance movement targets one of the government’s top computer security experts for assassination. But when the shooter can’t pull the trigger, folks from both sides of the conflict end up alienated from their groups. The problem here lies in the execution. This is a cheap, shot-on-video picture, which shouldn’t automatically doom it. Bad acting doesn’t help, but again it isn’t automatic death either. What kills it are the long scenes of people standing around in their cubes at work talking standard office nonsense or otherwise engaged in dull, everyday activity. If I want to look at that kind of thing, I can just go to work. Perhaps the director thought this would add a sense of realism to his show, but instead it turns the movie into a five-minute pat of butter spread over a feature-length loaf of bread. See if desperate

Review – The Lost Boys: The Tribe

The producers of this thing assume that their audience is composed of 12-year-old boys who’ve seen the 20-year-old original. I wonder how big the intersection on that Venn diagram really is. The sequel is a typical 21st century reheat: it features more sex and better gore but at the expense of worse acting and an inferior script. Overall it wasn’t the worst vampire movie I’ve ever seen (heck, it wasn’t even the worst vampire movie I saw the day I watched it). Mildly amusing

Review – Stolen

One of the most interesting cases – or at the very least one of the most expensive – in the history of art theft is the loss of several paintings from the Gardner museum. This documentary about the crime is approximately one third about the paintings and the theft, one third about museum founder Isabella Gardner and one third about the search for the paintings and the thieves. Though the whole thing is informative, the best parts are about insurance investigator Harold Smith. Mildly amusing

Review – Cthulhu

This is as close as anyone has come so far to making a Lovecraftian horror movie of a sort that I would make if I made movies. The plot is a reinvention of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in which a gay man returns to his old hometown for his mother’s funeral only to face his fundamentalist family. But the religion they adhere to is the cult of Dagon, mixing classic Yog Sothery with homosexual “coming out” issues in a way that actually works. And however unseemly the scene may be in which our hero is raped by Tori Spelling, the subtle use of the monsters more than makes up for it. Overall the production’s only disappointing part is that it somehow never quite manages to pull all its elements together. That notwithstanding, this is an excellent 21st-century rework of a 1931 horror story. Worth seeing

Review – I Have Never Forgotten You

The title of this biography of Simon Wiesenthal does double duty. On the one hand, it’s a Hallmark-moment comment about the man himself, but on the other it’s a chilling reminder of his relentless pursuit of Nazi fugitives. The Wiesenthal Center gets production credit, and the documentary makes copious use of photos and video supplied by his family. However, it’s hard to get upset about a one-sided telling of the tale, given that his targets were some of the world’s most loathsome mass murderers. The story of his concentration camp experience is sadly all too familiar, but once he begins his career as a Nazi hunter the plot becomes more interesting. Overall this is a reasonably good portrait of a fascinating subject. Mildly amusing