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…
Read moreArchives: Reviews
Back in 1999, I had this beautiful idea that was supposed to get me into movies free, forevermore: I’d write enough reviews to join the Online Film Critics Society. So, this is me, doing that. Except? No matter how many times I applied, I always got told that my reviews didn’t count, they weren’t really reviews, what was I doing, who’d I think I was, all that. This site back then was Cinemuck.com, even—it was very Geocities-era. Anyway, here they are, in all their . . . glory? I haven’t looked at them for twenty-plus years. Guessing I got some stuff way wrong. But? I may have lucked into a good line or two, too:
Stigmata
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,…
Read moreThe House on Haunted Hill
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…
Read moreJakob the Liar
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…
Read moreThe Insider
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,…
Read moreFight Club
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…
Read moreBats
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…
Read moreBlue Streak
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,…
Read moreThe Omega Code
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…
Read moreThree Kings
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…
Read moreThe Thirteenth Warrior
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…
Read moreLove of the Game
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…
Read moreThe Muse
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…
Read moreBowfinger
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…
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