July 2008
42 posts
Phil Bacharach Review: The Love Guru
(Oklahoma Gazette, June 25, 2008)
A checklist for lowest-common-denominator comedy:
Characters with naughty-sounding names that would elicit smirks in a seventh-grade classroom? Check. Pop-culture references sure to be dated long before the movie even appears on cable? Check. Mean-spirited routines ridiculing dwarfs, obese people and various non-Americans? Check. Lame jokes involving farts,...
Brandy McDonnell Review: The Flight of the Red...
With “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” Taiwanese writer-director Hou Hsiao Hsien creates an arthouse film meant to evoke emotion through improvised dialogue, minimalist plot and lyrical shots of the nontourist parts of Paris.Unfortunately, the emotion his film most consistently prompts is frustration.Click to read the rest of the review …
George Lang Review: The X-Files: I Want to Believe
“X-philes” cannot help going into “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” with enormous expectations. The 1993-2001 television series gave birth to a vast mythology filled with characters and details that continue to haunt fans’ daydreams and nightmares.
But creator Chris Carter’s decision to resist unearthing that mythology with the second “X-Files” feature film should...
Michael Smith Review: Bigger, Stronger, Faster
It has long been the American way to think that we are “Bigger, Stronger, Faster” than everyone else, and that if our competition is catching up, or even passing us, we will do what is necessary to stay ahead.
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James Vance Review: Jellyfish
“Jellyfish,” with a title directly translated from the original Hebrew “Meduzot,” is a sweet and wistful little drama from Israel that offers good performances and a number of intriguing scenes. Unfortunately, like its namesake, it’s in serious need of a spine.
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Kim Brown Review: When Did You Last See Your...
Watching a loved one endure a prolonged illness is a torture most people wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy. Yet, it’s an unforgettable and life-altering experience, which is well captured in the independent film, “When Did You Last See Your Father?”
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Michael Smith Review: Step Brothers
Playing lunk-headed chauvinists such as Ron Burgundy and over-competitive doofuses such as Ricky Bobby, Will Ferrell has long succeeded in the comedy of male stupidity on film. Building on his “Saturday Night Live” persona, the star grooved with his audience and built up a degree of goodwill. His newest effort, “Step Brothers,” is bad Will.
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George Lang Review: Step Brothers
“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” only scratched the surface of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s comic chemistry. Director Adam McKay’s “Step Brothers” shows the skilled improv comedians in their naturally crass environment, whipping up laughs at an almost exhausting speed.
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James Cooper Review: The X-Files: I Want to...
“The X-Files: I Want to Believe” feels like a strange hodgepodge of a movie. On the one hand, it is apparent that creators Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz want to veer far away from the alien mythology that drove the show during the better part of the nineties. It is apparent because the film, the second big screen adventure for the television show that created an entire subculture of...
The Movies I Love: Doug Bentin on "All Wet"
Note that “All Wet” is over 80 years old so I don’t mind writing about some plot elements in a way that would be “spoiling” if I were writing about a contemporary film.
I’ve read that this very funny one-reeler is just the surviving half of a two-reeler, but nothing connected to the DVD release of this film indicates that it is incomplete. Given the fact that some of its elements seem pretty...
Matthew Price Review: The Dark Knight
“The Dark Knight” begins as a heist caper, as goons in clown masks execute a bank robbery. But the twists in that scene foreshadow the entire film: “The Dark Knight” will not be business as usual.
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George Lang Review: Reprise
Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” is the sum total of a first-time director’s formidable influences, but at its core is a vivid story about the ambition and angst of young men trying to be artists.
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Kim Brown Review: Space Chimps
What is it about family-friendly space adventure movies lately? They seem to be as vital to movie studios this summer as superheroes. But unlike last week’s box-office bomb, “Meet Dave” — where Eddie Murphy portrayed a spaceship — this week’s animated “Space Chimps” is sure to be a crowd-pleaser, at least for the 10 and younger set.
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Jim Chastain Review: Hancock
Hancock is the most schizophrenic film I’ve ever seen. Seriously.
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Michael Smith Review: Flight of the Red Balloon
Glorious photography and an experimental narrative full of improvised dialogue combine to make “The Flight of the Red Balloon” an impressive, abstract work of art on film. The final product — like a canvas of French impressionism hanging in a museum — will engender a variety of reactions.
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Michael Smith Review: The Dark Knight
I have an announcement: The new Batman film, “The Dark Knight,” is the best film I’ve seen this year, a mesmerizing, sobering tale of modern mythology meets grand crime saga, hard-wired for the new world order of terrorism. It’s fantastic, frightening and nearly flawless.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Let's Get Lost
Fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker Bruce Weber captures both the natural musical genius and relentless self-destructive tendencies of Oklahoma jazz great Chet Baker in his striking black-and-white documentary “Let’s Get Lost.”
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James Vance Review: The Dark Knight
With this week’s release of “The Dark Knight,” the summer’s 300-pound gorilla is officially out of its cage, and it lives up to every bit of the fevered hype we’ve heard over the last few months.
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James Cooper Review: Mamma Mia!
Donna (Meryl Streep) sings and dances, glides and skips around her seaside villa with the thrill of a sixties flower child. Of course, this moment feels remarkably reminiscent of those earlier times, an era when the politics of sexual liberation defined a generation of hippies determined to experience the promise of free love. And, while the sixties exist as a distant forty year memory of a time...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Heathers - 20th High...
Teen suicide is no laughing matter — at least under normal circumstances — but that seemingly safe assumption is put to the test in Heathers . Revisiting the film with Anchor Bay’s curiously titled two-disc 20th High School Reunion Edition — curious because the movie was released in 1989 — it is interesting to find that the passage of time has done nothing to dilute...
The Movies I Love: Doug Bentin on "Bedlam" (1946)
Boris Karloff was always publicly grateful to the horror genre and its fans for making him a star and allowing him to maintain that status, even if most of the films he starred in were far from memorable for anything other than his presence. But he also made no secret of his preference for historical melodrama, a love he carried over into movies from the stage plays in which he had performed for...
Isn't it romantic? Kim Brown's favorite...
Ah, to be young and in love.
To me, summer is one of the best times for a romantic comedy, but to the Hollywood Powers That Be, the season mostly means superheroes, digitally animated wonders and Will Smith.
Not that there’s anything wrong with these mainstays - I loved “Iron Man” and “The Incredible Hulk,” and I’ll probably attend a 6 a.m. viewing of “The...
Kim Voynar Review: Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
There have been a couple of previous American Girl movies, made for television; my favorite was about Samantha (that one starred AnnaSophia Robb, in a pre-Bridge to Terabithia role that showed her promise as a young actress). After the success of those films (and, no doubt, hoping to spawn a new wave of merchandise sales at the popular American Girl Boutiques, website, and catalog), someone at...
Kim Voynar Review: Hancock
I wanted to go into Hancock knowing as little as possible, so I deliberately avoided reading anything about it — at least, as much as that was possible given the amount of movie blog reading I do on a daily basis. Nonetheless, it was hard to miss that early reviews trickling in from places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter were not, shall we say, overly positive. On the other hand, several...
Michael Smith Review: The Children of Huang Shi
If Steven Spielberg hadn’t made a movie about the man, the public at large still wouldn’t have the foggiest idea as to the identity or importance of Oskar Schindler’s life-saving efforts at the close of World War II. “The Children of Huang Shi” won’t bring the same fame to George Hogg, but this good-natured drama is a worthwhile memorial to a little-known...
Brandy McDonnell Review: Meet Dave
“Meet Dave” isn’t as offensively bad as the movies the puppet robots on the TV series “Mystery Science Theater 3000” so wittily mocked.
Rather, the science-fiction comedy continues Eddie Murphy’s streak of middling, mildly amusing movies aimed at families.
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Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: Definitely, Maybe
Writer-director Adam Brooks adds a little mystery to the romantic comedy formula with the refreshingly smart and engaging “Definitely, Maybe.”
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Michael Smith Review: Hancock
For lack of a better term, “Hancock” is a revisionist superhero movie. There is no hero riding in on a white horse to clash in an epic battle with a bad guy in a black hat. The closest thing to a villain in this film would be the character’s inner turmoil. “Hancock” is an original, and that makes it in no way a safe or predictable motion picture choice for its...
James Vance Review: Hellboy II: The Golden Army
In this summer’s box office battle of the super guys, Hellboy is probably going to get his horns handed to him — but that doesn’t mean that the big guy won’t go down swinging, and in the process delivering the most entertaining film of the entire bunch.
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James Cooper Review: Hellboy II The Golden Army
You will find it very difficult … to care about the heroics of the superhero in Guillermo del Toro’s follow-up, “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” a film so unable to reconcile any of its creative tendencies that it cannot cohere into something mildly entertaining.
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Gene Triplett Review: Journey to the Center of the...
Visual-effects-man-turned-director Eric Brevig plunges us deep into the world of state-of-the-art 3-D with his modernized version of Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” a family entertainment that’s as viscerally thrilling as a roller coaster ride and just about as intellectually rewarding as one, too.
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Mike Robertson on Sylvester Stallone: A Sad Waste...
This is pretty random, but during a recent visit to Ross Dress for Less, of all places, I found a rack full of $4.50 DVDs. They were mostly castoff full-screen versions of older movies that have been re-released as Director’s Cuts or on Blue Ray or whatever new formatting they’re trying to foist on us now.
Most of the selection was pretty crappy, but I did find Lords of Dogtown (which made me...
Kim Brown Review: WALL-E
It’s hard to imagine all the difference one little green plant could make. And one little robot, whether he knows it or not, has discovered the key to saving the planet, albeit hundreds of years in the future in “WALL-E,” the latest digitally animated film from Pixar. They have worked their science-meets-art magic once again with this romantic tale about the trash-compacting,...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: In Bruges
Independent cinema loves professional hit men. In fact, hit men are so beloved in indies that they’ve transmogrified into an archetype of something other than just professional killer. They’re brooding wits, sociopaths who don’t let their dark side overtake their humanity or obscure a command of pop culture that could rival Chuck Klosterman. But In Bruges, written and directed by...
James Cooper Review: Hancock
I suppose that its concept should actually make “Hancock” a better film. In fact, the first thirty minutes provide enough moments of inspired hilarity and political incorrectness that by the time you get to the disappointing final act of the film, you have little else to do but throw your hands up in equal parts confusion and irritation.
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George Lang Reivew: Kit Kittredge: An American...
Possibly the biggest surprise about “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl” is that it is the best live-action family film in a disconcertingly long time. This is a beautifully directed, smart movie with good messages, gentle humor and a sense of history, but it never feels like homework — it is good and good for you.
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James Vance Review: Reprise
Even though it’s clearly set in the present day, the Norwegian drama “Reprise” is reminiscent of nothing so much as the finely crafted art films that people like Truffaut and Godard were turning out 40 years ago. For modern-day audiences with a taste for cinema more challenging than franchise action flicks and frat-boy-level slapstick, that should come as welcome news.
Click to...
"Redrum"
A most inspired promo from Great Britain’s Channel 4, which is about to air the films of the great, late Stanley Kubrick. This single tracking shot meticulously recreates Kubrick’s The Shining, right down to look-alikes for cast and crew. It just makes me want to fish out that DVD and watch it for the 80th time.
— Phil Bacharach
"300" sequel in works?
OK, if you saw “300,” you can think of one pretty excellent reason that there wouldn’t be a sequel. But according to Sunday’s Variety, Frank Miller, who wrote the original “300” graphic novel, is penning a sequel. Or prequel. Or spinoff. Or something. If Zack Snyder likes the take, he’s said to be amenable to a return to Sparta. Miller’s current...
Matthew Price Review: Hancock
Hard-drinking superhero Hancock (Will Smith) finds himself out of favor with the public in “Hancock,” a film directed by Peter Berg.
The 1996 screenplay “Tonight, He Comes,” by Vincent Ngo, was considered one of the great unfilmable screenplays, about a superhero with an existential crisis having an affair with a married woman.
Rewritten by Vince Gilligan and eventually renamed “Hancock,” the...
The Movies I Love: Doug Bentin on "White Heat"
Note that White Heat is over 50 years old so I don’t mind writing about some plot elements in a way that would be “spoiling” if I were writing about a contemporary film.
Although he considered it just another throw-away gangster movie, James Cagney put everything he’d learned about acting into his performance in White Heat. If you’ve ever seen anything else like it in an American film, you must...