Diving into a fiction of a fiction. In 1979, Captain America takes time out from saving Americans, to save Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan, under the cover of THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT, a fake resort run by him and his superhero pals, to throw the Sudanese government off their taut-buttocked scent. Chris Evans is Ari Levinson, heading a team … Read More
ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES
The Corporatization of Dumbification. There are a few above-average jokes in ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES, but most of them are quite average. Underpinning the plot of a TV news anchorman struggling to find meaning in his job and love life, there is the cheeky indictment of the vapid 24-hour news culture and, by association, indictment of all those responsible … Read More
MOVIE 43
Disgusting Inappropriate Filthy Hilarious Hellspawn Godsend. Specifically designed to make you call your Congressman and complain, MOVIE 43 will offend, distress, embarrass, infuriate, ejaculate, and give you anal warts. Not your average ensemble cast movie where everyone is trying to be more serious than their peers in order to win that Golden Globe, MOVIE 43 takes its A-Listers, jams them … Read More
YOU’VE GOT MAIL
You’ve Got Fail. There’s nothing like a good romance. And YOU’VE GOT MAIL is nothing like a good romance. You see, it’s trying to sell us “romance” via e-mail. And the very nature of electronic mail – digitization, depersonalization – removes the elements that romance is built upon. Writer-director Nora Ephron has taken an old story (Ernst Lubitsch’s THE SHOP … Read More
DEAR GOD
Dear God! Make it stop! Dear God, What foul transgression did humankind perpetrate to deserve this accursed movie? For surely it is your undying wrath that allows such offal from the buttocks of Lucifer. Dear God, Why give Greg Kinnear such an august kickstart into the A-List with SABRINA only to snatch away his momentum with DEAR GOD? Dear God, … Read More
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
A man-size Jack in a girl-size film. Saw this movie at the cinema with a male friend. We were two men – men who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. And AS GOOD AS IT GETS blindsided us. The marketing was smart. Yes, Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson were probably going to end … Read More
FLASH OF GENIUS
Motor City Mad Man. The David versus Goliath story – with David wielding an Intermittent Windshield Wiper. Antonio Meucci, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Alfred Russell Wallace – all these men had their ideas stolen, only credited years, decades after their ideas had entered the fabric of society under other mens’ names: the telephone, Superman, evolution… Who knows how many … Read More
GHOST TOWN
Afterlife Strife. Leonard Maltin’s splash-review for GHOST TOWN reads, “Clever, Heartfelt and Funny!” (Don’t you love the way they capitalize the adjectives like they’re proper nouns?) As much as I loathe splash-reviews, Maltin is right.Though his four-word splash is somewhat less egregious than the one-word splash (“Terrific!” – New York Times; “Spellbinding” – People Magazine; and the most egregious of … Read More
INVINCIBLE
Vince-ible. …really wasn’t all that good a movie – but he looked hot in it. — my female friend. Pretty much sums up the Mark Wahlberg vehicle, INVINCIBLE. Written like a Runaway Cliché by Brad Gann and directed well by Ericson Core, INVINCIBLE is the usual “Inspired by a True Story” film that is itself geared to inspire. Grimace. Though … Read More
WE WERE SOLDIERS
We Were Soldiers, In A Plotless Movie. Like the Viet Nam war, WE WERE SOLDIERS has no plot. And like the Viet Nam war, the movie drones on incessantly with half of America saluting it and the other half protesting that it should be ended. The number of isolated incidents Hollywood can potentially mine for movies about WWII or Viet … Read More