Reviews

night & the city In movies about surveillance–say, End of Violence, Enemy of the State–the question quickly becomes Who watches the watchers. Similarly, with crooked cop shows (Bad Lieutenant, among others), the question takes the form of Who enforces the law for the enforcers. It makes sense then that Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, […]

the usual suspects On one side, there’s Satan himself, still trying to murder the world, and on the other there’s an unbeliever, who just happens to be the only one with half a chance to save that world. We’ve seen the story again and again and again, and the creators of End of Days had

calcium deficient It used to be enough just to have a serial killer on-screen, but then all the movies had a serial killer, meaning that if a movie wanted to distinguish itself, its serial killer had to be unique. And uniqueness translates easily into eccentric. Norman Bates wearing-your-mother’s-dress type stuff. Or, later, Buffalo Bill, making

the six-and-a-halfth sense Take Chinatown as the archetypical detective movie. In it a private investigator has to reconstruct some crime bit by bit. And the crime of course happened before the movie started. And everyone tries to steer him off the case. And it all gets real personal real fast, to the point where the

critical mass Stigmata was marketed as horror, when it’s not. It’s a religious thriller. There is a difference. Whereas (good) horror startles and disturbs you, the religious thriller unseats you, unsettles you. Doesn’t make you leave the light on. Think Omen, Exorcist, not Prophecy. All the same though, Stigmata is a bit more upbeat than

it’s alive The premise of The House on Haunted Hill is as schlocky as they come: whoever lives through the night gets a million dollars. Forget about all the foreshadowing and character motivations and exposition &etc that a typical horror movie usually has to wade through in order to get to the haunted house. The

true lies In a Holocaust movie the question is never Is the hammer going to fall, but When is the hammer going to fall. And who’s going to live through razing the ghetto. Who’s going on the train. Before we even sit down to Jakob the Liar, we already expect these questions to be answered.

160 minutes The first question to ask of a two and a half-plus hour movie is could it have been shorter and still achieved the same effect? With a Heat, yes; with The Insider, no. The next question then is was that effect worth two and a half-plus hours, which is a little trickier to

kings of pain The cultural anthropologists suggest we play violent sports because–in a more or less peaceful society–we have no other socially-condoned outlet for our aggression(s). But not everyone boxes on the week-ends. Some just go see movies like David Fincher’s Fight Club, which, as with Natural Born Killers, gives us vicarious access without the

guanomania In Cujo there was one bat, and a handful of people died. Now imagine there are thousands of bats. Net result? Even more people die. But now of course the bats are digital, and–in close-up–bear some serious family resemblance to the little ‘demons’ in The Gate. Which is part of the fun: horror is

an inside job Bad luck is central to comedies, simply because bad luck erases fault, fault which could make guilt. And guilt isn’t funny. So, in order to remain funny, include lots of bad luck. Les Mayfield’s Blue Streak does, over and over and over. As a result, it is funny, the same kind of

indirectly to video It is possible to counterbalance weak writing with high action, cool effects, all that. Look at all the American Ninjas, Gymkatas, etc, which, though admittedly lacking in story, are nevertheless fun to watch for all the head kicks and double back flips. Or, take Fair Game, a shoddy movie with very well-choreographed

triple rex Three Kings opens just as Desert Storm is winding down, but still, manages to emblemize the whole war in that one opening scene, where the conflict is pared down to its most ridiculous: the American soldier fighting the Iraqi soldier for possession of one small little hill (mound) in the middle of the

antonio the arabian viking A work (novel, movie, whatever) only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it’s been part of conventional knowledge for so long that the audience gets all the little in-jokes, can appreciate the asides, the irony, etc. To look at it another way, a work only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it’s been

mr. baseball The trick in a movie with a title like Love of the Game is to, by the end of the movie, redefine ‘game’ so that it refers not so much to sports but to the main character’s life situation. Thus winning or losing the game means a little more. It’s a common enough

cameo parade Through Get Shorty we learned that to make it in Hollywood, you have to be not of Hollywood. That way all your ‘foreign’ methods of doing things will be just new enough to work. The west coast was a cakewalk for Chili Palmer and his in your face, loan-shark approach. It’s similarly easy

uncanned Steve Martin is at his best when his character is trying to sell something not really worth buying. See his silver-tongued evangelist in Leap of Faith, a character both reprehensible and sympathetic, the endearing used car salesman. Eddie Murphy’s at his best when allowed to do variations on his always-one-step-ahead -of-you-and talking-twice-as-fast Axel Foley.

shyamalan’s way In Speilberg’s Always, the dead hang around for awhile, tying up the loose ends of their lives. In Jacob’s Ladder, the dead hang around in a similar manner, having to make peace before they can move on. Ditto with Beetlejuice, High Plains Drifter, Ghost, etc. It’s all about preparation. In that regard the

hoosiers on ice In 1976 Rocky said it once and for all: \\\”I can’t beat him. But that don’t bother me. The only thing I want to do is to go the distance, that’s all.\\\” The determined underdog, the noble nobody, the champion-in-waiting. These are the things we love. Mystery, Alaska (re)delivers them, packaged nicely

looking closer Most movies willingly yield to even minimal analysis–fall apart in your hands, into a set of easily identifiable conventions, character types, etc. Not so with director Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, the story of what the suburban American dream looks like minus the veneer, the ‘image’ of success each of the characters is either

simple math Movies about serial killers are typically from some detective’s POV as he and we try to figure out just who the serial killer is. Why is it like this? Simply because if the audience isn’t seduced into some sort of sympathetic relationship with the ostensible main character of the movie, that movie doesn’t

a league of their own The trailer didn’t lie: Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) has captured Captain Amazing (wholesome Greg Kinnear), leaving a superhero-sized void in the skies of Champion City. Enter Mr Furious, the Bowler, the Shoveler, Blue Raja & Co. (Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, William H. Macy, and Hank Azaria) to fill that void

high infidelity The structure of Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut is older than cinema itself, but hardly new to it: an everyman type encounters boundary situation X, which draws him into some analogue of the unconscious, where he journeys, learns, etc, and then that man is reborn. It’s the Odysseus monomyth. Most recently

people in the mist In comic books, when you go live with the animals for a couple of years you come back a super-hero; in Instinct, that’s half the case: ‘Ape-man’ Dr. Ethan Powell (silverback Anthony Hopkins) does come back from the Rwandan jungle with ‘super’ powers—an animal ferocity–but, as he’s in the land of

blown away When someone’s paranoid in a movie and no believes him or her, that paranoia will be justified. It’s cliche. Similarly, when the neighbors are perfect, they aren’t. In Arlington Road, Michael Faraday, (Jeff Bridges) teacher of an American-Terrorism course, suspects his neighbors just might be terrorists. And no one believes him. And this