You maniacs! You blew it up!… WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES concludes the modern APES trilogy started in 2011 with RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. An epic film doing its best to capture the immensity of a protracted battle between two species for the stewardship of a planet, it succeeds on many intellectual and technical levels, … Read More
THE RIDICULOUS 6
Ridiculous is as Ridiculous does… It’s Sandler versus Tarantino in a battle of the adjectives. SPOILER ALERT: Tarantino wins. So you’re going to call your movie THE RIDICULOUS 6? An unsubtle spoof of the title of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming humbucker, THE HATEFUL 8. In what universe are audiences unaware of this? It’s not even a spoof on the Tarantino movie … 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
A PERFECT GETAWAY
Sunny, with a chance of homicide. Remember when it was cool for a movie to have a twist? Even a bad twist was a Good Thing. Then M. Night Shyamalan came along and gave us The Greatest Twist Of All in THE SIXTH SENSE… and screwed it up for everyone. “Twist” has become a bad word over the last decade, … Read More
THAT THING YOU DO!
That Thing Done Well is a Thing of Beauty Indeed. Snappy and exhilarating, THAT THING YOU DO! focuses on the rise and fall of a one-hit wonder pop group ensconced in British Invasion-era America. Full credit to writer-director Tom Hanks for crafting an entertaining vehicle in which he stars, that he is not the star of – instead making the … Read More