Reviews

ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny The Jaws structure works because it’s simple: oversized shark enters isolated community, begins feeding, has a few good kills and chase scenes, then is in turn chased and killed, largely because the whole meal-thing got a little too personal somewhere along the way. Man versus nature, intellect against instinct, all that. Deviate […]

chronicle of a death foretold Emily Dickinson started one of her poems off ‘Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me.’ James Wong’s Final Destination pretty much just removes the ‘kindly’ from that idea. It gets going just as the trailer promises, too: with a fiery plane crash. Meaning we

houston, we have a problem Aliens taught us that in space, no one can hear you scream. Mission to Mars teaches us something a little closer to home: that in the theatre, everyone can hear you scream. That’s about the only fitting response to something like this, though. Quite simply, Mission to Mars played a

skin deep Professor Tripp’s (Michael Douglas) life is complicated, complicated enough that it takes a solid third of Wonder Boys just to get the guy properly introduced. We’re talking real-time here, too, a 2 Days in the Valley kind of schedule, just up in that New England rain. And, because he’s a writer, of course

don’t let the sun go down on me Pitch Black operates on the same premise as Asimov’s \\\”Nightfall\\\”: when the sun goes down, the calamity starts. In \\\”Nightfall,\\\” however, what darkness brings with it is social upheaval, the breakdown of civilization, all that, which is to say the cycle of destruction functions as some kind

the monitor and the monitored Eye of the Beholder is a movie in which many secrets are kept. Most importantly, we never get a clear idea why the Eye’s (Ewan McGregor) wife and kid might be estranged, and we never get a good handle on the clinical aspects of Joanna’s (Ashley Judd) sociopathic compulsions. And

the final cut: slash and learn The third installment of any horror movie franchise is itself something of a zombie–a dead thing being forced to walk around, a re-animated corpse, just shuffling through the motions of life, pretending that the story which drives it is still vital, isn’t just the first installment in a different

tom & jerry in space A good eighty-percent of science fiction in the movies owes everything to horror. Yes, Alien was great, but structurally, what’s the real difference in it and, say, Halloween? Event Horizon and Hellraiser? Yet we tend to privilege sci-fi over such horror, if only the slightest bit, largely because the emptiness

going the distance We all love the end of Rocky III, where Rocky and Apollo face each other on the canvas not as friends, but as fighters. It’s both violent and tender somehow, knowing that they’re tight enough to want to pull their punches yet competitive enough not to even consider it. Sports-obsessed Ron Shelton’s

all the longest yards Any Given Sunday opens tight on the ball, pre-snap, and if it wasn’t in widescreen we might think it’s really just Sunday afternoon again. But then there’s the tribal music pounding in, which, along with all the fancy camerawork, is a giveaway that this is Oliver Stone football. Meaning lots of

single white male These Pacific Heights type stories are usually told from the victims’ point of view, which serves to make the ‘villain’ more threatening, as he could pop into any scene. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, director Anthony Minghella (working from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, the first in a series of Ripley-novels) takes the alternate

chubby rain Traditionally, a commercial movie, no matter how experimental it pretends to be, will nevertheless cling to at least one dramatic requirement: the introduction, early on, of a problem, a question to be answered, something to be solved. It’s important to get the audience’s interest piqued early on, after all, else they won’t pay

the act behind the man Man on the Moon’s big draw isn’t Andy Kaufman. That would be too big a gamble, as his comedy takes a refined sense of humor to appreciate, to say the least. Likely, Milos Forman was aware of this, so he tried to shift things ever so slightly, away from Andy

menage-a-quatre In Eyes Wide Shut–which Sidney Pollack also had a bit part in–a husband overextends himself trying to deal with his wife’s betrayal. Random Hearts isn’t so different, insofar that ‘Dutch’ Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford) also goes to great lengths in an effort to deal with his wife’s adultery. An occasionally misguided effort, yes,

neck deep in character As we all know, Earth started polluting interstellar space with television signals in 1939. Fast-forward 60-odd years now, into a reality for all intents and purposes ours, except here Star Trek isn’t Star Trek, but the all-too similarly cloaked \\\”Galaxy Quest.\\\” During those 60-odd years, too, some of those escaped television

undoing golgotha As all good serial killer movies must, Resurrection opens on the scene of the crime, which fosters the necessary illusion that we’re starting at the same place the detective is: with a mangled body from which we / he have to reconstruct the crime, which will in turn identify the criminal. That’s the

of mice and men In keeping with blockbusters like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile is a story told by a participant now in the golden years of life. Aside from the dramatic frame, (weepy prologue, nostalgic epilogue . . .) this set-up has two narrative functions: A) by making the story ‘told,’

fourhorsemen, one apocalypse When we think stadium rock the kneejerk association is the decadent hairbands of the 80’s. But there was a time when it was more pure. Or, less pure, but in a more original way. The time is 1978. The band is KISS. The place is director Adam Rifkin’s Detroit Rock City, temporary

losing my religion Angels in the movies are nothing new. From Wings of Desire to A Life Less Ordinary. Similarly, the idea of Earth as a battlefield is older than Milton, and has been done as well (Prophecy I & II, etc). God’s even taken mortal (comic) form before, as George Burns. However, never before

unbewitched Crazy in Alabama is an ‘I learned a lot of secrets that summer’ movie, in-line with Stand by Me and all the Stand by Me pretenders. Which is to say it’s retrospective, nostalgic, voiced-over, all that. And, as it’s set in the summer of 1965, any ritual growing up that’s done is of course

lost in the age of reason Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has traditionally been classed with children’s lit., and is subsequently invoked every Halloween along with Charlie Brown specials etc. Which is to say the figure of the headless horsemen has–via steady bombardment (see: product placement)–lost much of its scare power, become tame

shaken, stirred, but never whipped In of the trademark opening stunts of The World is Not Enough, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) rides a rope and a prayer down like ten sheer stories, sets down lightly into the bemused sidewalk traffic, then accidentally catches the eye of a passerby. What we expect at this point is

half the fun Part of the appeal of cinema/narrative is the space between the scenes, the B we have to fill in to get from A to C. It’s about economy, allows more to be said with less words. Simple stuff. Language is similarly streamlined, and can be streamlined as such because both speaker and

I, robot Stories tend to come in two flavors: either the hero is in some sort of jeopardy (emotional, mortal, existential, etc) the whole time, or the hero is on some quest, during which he has to overcome various (life-threatening, etc) obstacles. Granted, as both of these story-types entail not only ‘jeopardy’ but the eventual

alice in hollywood [nj] The test of a fantastic story is whether or not you can interpret it in such a way that all the ‘fantastic’ stuff comes out as projected material–some character’s internal world being presented as external. Think Fisher King. To look at it another way, if you strip off all the fantastic