Reviews

love in the uk Notting Hill opens very British, very proper, with William Thacker (Hugh Grant) introducing himself with a casual voice-over, then taking us on an establishing stroll through his neighborhood, his home, Notting Hill. During this walk we learn a) his wife has left him; b) he runs a bookstore which specializes in […]

peripherally envisioned What gets you in a haunted house movie are the quiet moments, when you expect something to happen. A good haunted house movie incubates this, stacks up a few false positives, then knocks them down all at once in a crash of cymbals, only to start the whole process over. Think The Shining,

not a space odyssey The X-Files taught us that alien colonization won’t be loud like Independence Day, but insipient, like Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, all that. More They Live than War of the the Worlds. The trailer establishes all this with minimal effort, too, as it’s already conventional knowledge. And we are hungry for it,

the last american virgin In Happiness everything revolved around a young boy’s ejaculation, and we all kind of looked away and accepted it. In American Pie, happiness is ejaculation, only now there are enough puerile body fluid jokes that we can’t look away. Too, though, the trailer didn’t mislead us. With a logline like ‘There’s

in the absence of shag In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, set in the 90s, Austin’s arch-nemesis Dr. Evil is laughably stuck in the 60s, demanding a million dollars to ransom the world, etc. Now it’s the second installment, though, and, to keep it interesting, Mike Myers has turned it all around: back in

sputnik with legs The dilemma for all the ‘tin men’ in literature/media has always been Do I have a heart or not? From Oz to Star Trek to director Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. But The Iron Giant is so much more, too. It opens with a meteor (the Iron Giant, here) hurtling through space,

vertigo among thieves In the summers that aren’t Bond-summers, we get the Bond-movies without Bond. Which is to say gadget movies, all the high-tech toys and death-defying leaps that’ll fit into 2 hrs. Entrapment is all of this and more: it even has the original Bond–Sean Connery–playing high-stakes cat thief Mac. More or less the

war of the worlds Lest we forget, Deliverance was 1972. Six years later The Hills Have Eyes. Two decades later they still do. And James Dickey’s backwoods have always been there in the unconscious, waiting. What The Blair Witch Project does is take us back to those woods, and then leave us there with three

julia’s mile Romantic comedy is largely about oppositions, and the eventual collapse of those oppositions into a happy ending. Which suggests that those oppositions weren’t oppositions after all. In Gary Marhsall’s Runaway Bride, Maggie (Julia Roberts) and Ike (Richard Gere), are earmarked early on for such a happy ending by how opposite they seem to

canadian gadflies Heavy Metal shocked us by having nude, animated people frolic on-screen, (as did Fantastic Planet, etc) which is to say it was a cartoon for grown-ups. Or, to look at it another way, the cartoon grew up with its initial audience, that is, the audience grew up to make their own cartoon. But,

interdimensional mol The tagline for The Thirteenth Floor is ‘You can go there even though it doesn’t exist.’ As far as things go that don’t exist, though, the simulated 1937 we start with is pretty convincing, or, is made even more convincing by Armin Mueller-Stahl’s Hannon Fuller character, whose nervous eyes, hesitant accent, and slight

deep in the video arena First there was Tron, the movie and the videogame. Next came The Last Starfighter, where life was a videogame, more or less. Soon enough cyberpunk reigned and Johnny Mnemonic was born into the neuroscape of virtual reality; not long after, virtual reality gave birth itself, and Russell Crowe got to

virtual messiah The most successful use of the messiah-figure in movie-land so far has to be Star Wars, where young Luke ‘redeems’ that far away galaxy. And of course the narrative arc associated with the messianic character is the monomythic cycle, per Joseph Campbell, whom Lucas supposedly read heavily. Meaning Star Wars was no accident

embalmed with a grin Here’s the story: three-thousand odd years ago some Jafar-type priest / sorcerer got caught romancing the pharaoh’s wife. Pretty typical stuff, but then the pharaoh turns out have gone to the same school as all the Bond-nemeses, the one where they ask why kill the guy when there are so many

unexpendable crewmen In Lake Placid staying alive is easier than you’d think, with a 35 ft. crocodile prowling the waters. All you have to do is talk: none of the characters with significant dialogue are killed, though they sorely need to be. Viewers sometimes bemoan the conventions of the horror- movie–all the little faux pas