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…
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:
The Blair Witch Project
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…
Read moreRunaway Bride
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…
Read moreSouthpark
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…
Read moreThe Thirteenth Floor
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…
Read moreeXistenZ
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…
Read moreThe Matrix
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…
Read moreThe Mummy
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…
Read moreLake Placid
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…
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