Review – The Curse of the Cat People

Apparently the cat people’s curse is that the sequel shall include no cat people. The characters from the first one are back, but now poor, witless Oliver is married to his gal-on-the-side Alice and the pair have a pre-teen daughter. Little Amy is a daydreamer, which bothers her straight-arrow father to no end. As the father-daughter rift widens, the girl seeks solace in the company of the ghost of Irena, Oliver’s first wife, who actually was a cat person in the first movie. If considered strictly on its own merits, this is an amateurish but otherwise inoffensive production. However, it’s a poor excuse for a sequel to one of the best black-and-white horror movies ever made. See if desperate

Review – Pan’s Labyrinth

I’ve seen a lot of movies along these lines. Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters, Hook, and just about everything else he ever made that has a kid in it) in particular have dished out plenty of pictures about magic and imagination in the face of worldly evil. However, this one is head and shoulders better than just about all the rest. The Spanish Civil War provides a particularly chilling setting, particularly as personified by the protagonist’s stepfather, a cruel captain in the Fascist army. But the thing that impressed me the most was the flawless mix of innovation and fairy tale. Case in point: the eyeball monster. The creature, its lair, and the scene that takes place therein are all a terrific blend of special effects (of the non-digital kind no less!), art direction and dark, childhood fantasy. Overall director Guillermo del Toro does a superior job of capturing an often-grim real world through the eyes of a fantasy-obsessed girl. The vision is beautifully child-like without being sappily childish. Worth seeing

Review - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Bobcat Goldthwaite once joked that Elvis Presley shouldn’t have needed drugs because he was rich enough to pay people to perform hallucinations for him. Now thanks to Terry Gilliam, even the poor and humble can watch drug-addled weirdness without risking top dollar or arrest for possession. Johnny Depp does a good job in this cinematic version of Hunter S. Thompson’s conclusive proof – as if any were really necessary – that Las Vegas on acid is one strange place. Of course with a literary junkie protagonist, a pile of big names (presumably drawn by the hip-ness of the project) in the supporting cast, and a lot of bizarre special effects to create a reality-challenged experience, this evokes the memory of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; this time around the story is more cheerful but likewise more frivolous. Overall this came across as the sort of movie one makes when one loves a book but can’t quite find the cinematic “words” to express one’s affection. Mildly amusing

Review – Embedded '45: Shooting War in Germany

It’s a little hard to tell because of the English narration, but this appears to be a documentary originally produced for German television. Certainly problems with translation might go a ways toward explaining some of the odd information presented here and there. However, one could almost watch the movie with the sound off and still appreciate the main asset of the production: lots of fascinating footage of the last three months or so of the European end of World War Two. The movie-makers combed the National Archives and found some impressive stuff, film of American soldiers fighting house-to-house in the ruined cities of Germany, capturing prisoners of war, liberating work camps, and even executing an SS saboteur. However, the visuals aren’t aided much by the narration (mostly run-of-the-mill description with little insight into the process of shooting film in the middle of a war) or the added sound effects. The narrative structure also apparently required the re-use of some of the scenes, as (for example) we see the same POWs being captured at several points in the story. Overall this is worth it for the pictures as long as one doesn’t expect much else to go along with it. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Wears Prada

So now having a crappy job makes you worth a major motion picture? This is one of those message pieces that tend to defeat their own purposes. For example, I think we’re supposed to scoff at the fashion industry’s obsession with thinness. However, our supposedly normal-bodied protagonist is repeatedly identified as a size six. Not to mention that she’s played by model-esque Anne Hathaway. Much of the rest of this production is as stiff and ill-conceived as its take on positive body image. Like the corner of the publishing business it attempts to lambaste, this movie is pretty, slick and expensive but short on substance. Mildly amusing

Review – 21 Grams

Is the title a reference to the supposed weight of the soul (as measured when it departs the body after death) or the amount of coke you have to get into a studio executive before he’ll green-light a movie like this? Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro star as three people brought together by a fatal accident and a heart transplant. This stiff little melodrama’s only real claim to originality is that the scenes are scattered with no particular respect for chronology. That makes it annoying until one gets enough of the plot down to be able to piece the thing together (and only moderately less annoying even after the story finally emerges). See if desperate

Review – The Barnyard

Yeesh, what a dreadful experience. For starters, this is the biggest disconnect I’ve ever seen between the content of a movie and the studio’s description of the content of a movie. The box under the MPAA rating for this thing warns us of “some mild peril and rude humor.” In the first few minutes the protagonist’s father is murdered on-screen by vicious coyotes. The villains go on to threaten and/or attempt to kill every other animal in the movie. Paramount should know that this goes considerably beyond “mild peril,” but of course putting words such as “violence” or “terror” on the box would likely have cut into sales and rentals of a kiddie flick. If that had been the only problem, I could probably have extended some slack on the rating. But it gets worse. Nickelodeon Movies appears to be jockeying for the position of “Pixar Cheap” with efforts like this. The animation is terrible, not much better than current generation video game graphics. The cast is mostly has-beens and never-will-bes. Even the music sucks. A lot of it is off-the-rack, and the “original” performances tend to be things like a cow doing an acoustic version of an old Tom Petty tune. Still, I think the thing that sticks with me most is an odd bit of annoyance: all the bovines in this movie – male and female alike – have udders. Somebody here needs to get out of the big city every once in awhile. Wish I’d skipped it