Dirty Harry’s Place…

Here, edited a touch, is my review from May of 2007. Re-reading and reliving just what a diseased thing The Good German is, I’m not at all surprised its creator, Steven Soderbergh, has moved on to exalting a mass-murderer like Che. Not surprised at all.
THE GOOD GERMAN
The sound design isn’t bad. There, I promised myself […]

Revolutionary Road opens its story just after the conclusion of a disastrous community theatre production of The Petrified Forest where, on a small, suburban public school stage, April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) has suffered more than just humiliation, her self image as a unique individual with a special place in the world has been destroyed. Her husband, Frank […]

 
Nearly two and a half hours pass before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button hits you with any real warmth or poignancy and that’s an awfully long row to hoe in order to finally feel the way the lush trailer promised. The real failure of the film isn’t due to its frustrating lack of a central story […]

As documented here, here, and here, through the portrayal of the sympathetic child molester, the onscreen hyper-sexualization of young girls, and child characters liberated through sexual behavior, for a number of years now the film industry has waged a drip-drip campaign in favor of the normalization of sex between adults and underage children. The offensive is a quiet, insidious […]

Steven Soderbergh’s 257-minute, cinematic hagiography to Ernesto “Che” Guevera is a lie. A lie of omission and commission. A lie so afraid of its own shadow you’ll learn more about Castro’s Monster from his now iconic t-shirt image than from the film (on the shirts you can at least can see the wicked in his eyes). But this lie is also a […]

Director Darren Aronofsky’s stark look at the subculture of low-level professional wrestling builds to an impressive and ambitious character study that looks to be equal parts Requiem For A Heavyweight (1962) and The Set-Up (1949) before a predictable, cliched, cop-out of a climax unravels what had been so compelling into something more akin to What Price Narcissism?
Mickey Rourke summons […]

In his first film aimed directly at the holiday younger set, Bedtime Stories firmly remains an Adam Sandler picture even though, save for Booger Monster-type humor, all but gone are the gross-out gags and inner-rage which defines Sandler’s most famous films and characters. The result is a lively, funny and enchanting fable the whole family will enjoy –and that would be my […]

Jim Carrey’s problem isn’t that he lacks in talent or energy, his problem is that those traits he’s so gifted with made him a superstar and now he doesn’t lack for power over his own career. With the demise of the studio system and rise of the talent agent, stars now wield enormous influence over their choices, […]

Full reviews to come…
The Wrestler: Very good character study hampered just a tad by a weak subplot involving Rourke’s daughter and a cop-out ending.
Seven Pounds: Relentlessly mawkish.
Yes Man: All concept. Shallow, weak, no surprises, fewer laughs. Like a sitcom that disappears after 5 episodes.

Clint Eastwood’s hinted that Gran Torino might be his last turn in front of the camera. If that’s true, he could not have chose for himself a more fitting farewell. Without a hint of the self-referential, Torino touches on the many iconic moments of both his best genre pictures and more serious fare. Most of all, […]

Everything about The Day The Earth Stood Still is disjointed - doesn’t connect, doesn’t compute, doesn’t resonate. The story, character relationships, and even the special effects lack the cohesion necessary to grab hold of for the ride. Things happen to be sure, but they’re lonely pieces - disparate parts of other films, ideas, creators thrown together to make brown. To […]

Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon’s resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn’t been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank […]

 
Here’s the Showtime schedule.
And here’s part one and two of my interview with D.B. Sweeney, the film’s co-writer and director.
The Hot Little Number I Call Mrs. Harry and I just watched this for the second time the other night. We both enjoyed our first go-round and I wanted to finally review it now that Christmas is […]

The great irony no one will speak of with respect to Gus Van Sant’s biopic of slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk is that the last and most famous fight of Milk’s life was defeating Proposition 6, an indefensible 1978 California ballot initiative that would have made it the law of the land to hunt down and fire teachers suspected of being […]

 
A simple, fast paced story with vibrant animation and simple characters makes for a solid time killer but nothing more. Bolt is very much like a Saturday morning cartoon souped up and blown up for the big screen with a few inspired scenes, some laughs, but with a premise that’s hard to swallow even in a […]

 
Well let’s just say that I finally know what it means to be gobsmacked.
Twilight is the anti-everything awful and insidious produced these last fifteen years to further the left’s malicious goal of insinuating themselves in that spot they find most comfortable: right between you and your children. Not a single one of the cultural, sexual, or political pitfalls so […]

As though it were a nostalgic look back at an ideal WWII-era German childhood, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is filmed in lush, warm colors and told through the eyes of an eight year-old German boy named Bruno (Asa Butterfield). Knowing we’re watching a Holocaust tale, this choice promises to be one of contrast where — […]

By some tortured, objective filmmaking standard it might be possible to make the case that Quantum of Solace isn’t the worst James Bond film of all time, but I defy anyone to argue that it isn’t the least satisfying. After all, a bad James Bond film is still a James Bond film. There is that going for […]

As low-key as it is original, Role Models manages to deliver real laughs and heart thanks to a smart script and excellent performances. Somewhat disturbing, however, is the film’s comfort level with the idea of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Yes, the R-rating restricts access to those under 17, but still this troubling moral blind-spot takes something […]

Not having seen the original Madagascar, the first few minutes of this energetic follow-up lost me a bit as it laid the necessary pipe to reunite the characters. But once the story settled in, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa proved itself to be yet another beautifully animated but unexceptional product from the Dreamworks animation pipeline — with a subtle plug […]

I have a theory that one of the reasons films during the Golden Age were consistently better is because of censorship. When it came to sex and violence censorship forced creative solutions, but without censorship this creativity is no longer necessary — and how can less creativity ever be a good thing?
I don’t want to […]

This is one of those movies where for most of the two long hours you sit and wonder why?. Why with all that money they didn’t spend more time on the script. Why with a star like Mark Wahlberg they didn’t, well, spend more time on the script. It’s easy to forgive a film with […]

 
If the crowd in my theatre is any measure, as I predicted you can expect “W.” to have a good opening weekend. The place was pretty packed. Scattered laughs. Dead silence when it was over, but everyone had already paid their money, right?
“W.” is dreadful. An awful film filled with caricatures, an oppressive, schizophrenic score, claustrophobic feel […]

Director Ridley Scott’s latest, a Mideast thriller with as harsh a streak of anti-Americanism as you’ll ever see, has bigger problems than politics: it’s just plain boring. You keep waiting for the story to kick in and instead the movie aimlessly lurches from scene to scene for 129 minutes until it all adds up to nothing more than twists […]

 
In 1950 the great William Wellman directed a beautiful, understated, little religious-themed drama called The Next Voice You Hear. James Whitmore and Nancy Reagan (credited as Nancy Davis) star as a married couple so symbolic of the American middle class they’re named Joe and Mary Smith. They have a young son and a baby on the way when one evening […]