Review – Criminal Law

Gary Oldman plays a lawyer who wins a not-guilty verdict for a client (Kevin Bacon) only to have the psycho continue his serial killing ways. The two men develop a really creepy love-hate relationship as Oldman tries to find a way to get his clever, pop-collared client to slip up and get himself caught. Stir in some icky Oedipal stuff and a message about abortion that’s likely to please neither side of the debate, and you’ve got one hard to look at movie. See if desperate

Review – Dead Space: Downfall

If you like animated gore and you aren’t too picky about the quality of the animation, this may well be the show for you. A spaceship picks up an alien artifact that starts turning the whole crew into monsters in fairly short order. The main weapon of choice to combat the beasts is a combination of chain saw and light saber, which is about as close to clever or creative as this production ever comes. Much of the design work looks like a cheap knock-off of Doom 3 (no doubt at least somewhat related to the video game this thing is actually based on). Combine that with a nearly-nonexistent plot and you’ve got a waste of an hour or so. See if desperate

Review – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

When I was in high school, one of my friends was a real Douglas Adams nut. He’d quote this stuff like it was the most profound thing since the epistles of Paul. Even a quarter century later I think that still colors my perception of the stuff. Some of it is funny. A lot of it, however, plays like one of those skits on Monty Python’s Flying Circus that’s more odd than humorous. The plot (for anyone not already familiar) is the story of Arthur Dent, an ordinary guy suddenly sucked off the Earth right before it’s destroyed to make way for an interstellar highway. High jinks ensue. I’m guessing fans of the books will get a kick out of it, but it left me a little flat. Mildly amusing

Review – The Poseidon Adventure

The first 30 minutes or so of this picture are a lot of fun. Well, actually the lengthy introductions of all the annoying major characters are dull, but knowing that they’re all on a ship that’s about to capsize makes it all worthwhile. Then when the vessel tips some fun effects come into play. After that, however, the production sinks into a deep mire of speechifying and narrow escapes from doom as a small band of survivors tries to make it to the bottom – now the top – of the ship. If you see only one Irwin Allen movie, this would be a good candidate. But that assumes that you have to see an Irwin Allen movie for some reason. Mildly amusing

... and Zombies

For reasons known only to the American book-buying public, a tome known only as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has resided on the best-sellers list for some time now. I haven’t read it (nor do I intend to). For all I know it could be a work of staggering genius. It could also be a cheap trivialization of Jane Austen by the slap-dash addition of flesh-eating, ambient corpses. As we will soon be treated to another gift from the same publisher entitled Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, I'm guessing the latter is probably the case.

This suggests no end of possibilities for other empty-headed combinations of literature and movie monsters. I’ll let you form your own impressions about what the following eight books might be like.

• The Moon and Sixpence and the Bride of Frankenstein
• A Streetcar Named Dracula
• Madame Bovary Versus Godzilla
• Romeo and Juliet: Rise of the Lycans
• Dr. Dolittle and Mr. Hyde
• Invisible Man Meets The Invisible Man
• Lady Chatterly’s Creature from the Black Lagoon
• The Canterbury Tales from the Crypt

I can't wait for this trend to spread to textbooks. As a once-upon-a-time Art History student, I'm especially hopeful that some enterprising publisher will turn his seven-year-old kid loose on Gardner's Art Through the Ages and re-release it as Art Masterpieces and Moustaches.

Review – Ikiru

Funny how a phrase as grandiose as “triumph of the human spirit” seems so often apt to describe quiet little movies like this. Early in his career, Akira Kurosawa serves up the story of a bureaucrat who learns he has terminal stomach cancer. He spends the first half of the movie moping, feeling sorry for himself, and otherwise trying to come to grips with his fate. Then the production fast-forwards to his funeral, where his fellow paper-pushers reminisce about his efforts to get a park built. Slowly they come to realize that the park construction wasn’t merely an exercise in inter-office turf battling but rather an expression of his love of life. Such a summary is accurate enough but nonetheless inadequate to cover the sweet, subtle nuance of the picture. Buy the disc

Review – The Haunting of #24

This is one of those pictures where the director has a handful of good ideas for spooky shots and then tries unsuccessfully to weave a movie around it. The story is some flimsy nonsense about a young man who moves into a haunted apartment building. The old lady down the hall creeps him out. Ghosts live inside his TV (including his girlfriend after she goes missing). Someone’s buried in the back yard. As I said, it’s got a moment or two. But otherwise it’s just dull. Mildly amusing