A Dogsbody and his Peaboy. Thrilling adventures, comical characters and excellent animation, coupled with careless mixed messages, makes MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN a bittersweet doggie biscuit. Mr. Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell, THE SKELETON TWINS) is a Harvard graduate, an inventor, gourmand, athlete, virtuoso musician, licensed chiropractor, fencer, a Nobel Prize winner, a socialite, and advisor to heads of state … Read More
BURIED
Grave Trouble. Primal Fear time! One actor, one location, one goal: get me the hell outa here! An ingenious piece of filmmaking! Taken as a thought experiment, as a Hitchcockian mystery, as a suspense thriller, as an intense gutshock drama, BURIED – to borrow from a breezy Clint movie – will turn you Every Which Way But Loose. Ryan Reynolds … Read More
SINGLE WHITE FEMALE
When Roommates Go Tribade. A luscious woman is terrorized by a boxy woman. The boxy woman adopts the sexy woman’s hairdo, borrows her clothes and gives the sexy woman’s boyfriend a hummer. Terrifying, isn’t it? Really, guys, do any of you care? But seriously, who wouldn’t stalk Bridget Fonda? In this psychological thriller, she’s the luscious Allie, the SINGLE WHITE … Read More
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE
Going and coming across time. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time… He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between… he has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. — Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Everything we learned from Michael J. Fox … Read More
WILD HOGS
On The Road To Nowhere. There is only one good thing in WILD HOGS: Peter Fonda. And he’s a cameo ten minutes before the end. Naif director Walt Becker helms this listless, laughless tale of four suburban friends pushing middle-age crisis who hit the open road as wannabe bikers to taste “freedom” and come smack up against real bikers and … Read More
MEMENTO
The Reverse Genius Principle. 9) And that’s when we realize we could never be sure of anything to begin with. 8) When Leonard eventually thinks he has found his wife’s killer, eleventh-hour reveals shock us with the possibility that his whole crisis may be nothing more than delusion. 7) Editing MEMENTO must have been like navigating inside Las Vegas hotels with … Read More
GARFIELD
Flat Cat. Although Bill Murray (who voices Garfield) is truly a real-life simulacrum of the smug, under-enthused comic-strip cat, his intrinsically entertaining “character” was – dare I say it? – Lost In Translation (shout, but don’t hit) somewhere between the vapidity of the script and the orange computer blips representing the eponymous feline in GARFIELD. Garfield’s master, Jon (Blandness, thy … Read More