There is a good scene partway through Remember Me, Robert Pattinson’s newest appeal to America’s loins. In it, Tyler (Pattinson) and his girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin) list off fat New York Yankee players to irk Tyler’s rich, insensitive, Yankee-loving father (Pierce Brosnan). It’s a welcome comedic moment in a film that generally feels smothered by its’ desire to be taken seriously. Read more »
The Crazies needed a Keanu Reeves type: someone to look worried for minutes on end only to crack a half-smile so easy and reassuring, it could only come from the mouth of a genuine movie star. Timothy Olyphant as sheriff David Dutton is not blessed with this gift. He is stiffer than most of the zombies he battles off. Olyphant belongs in a Michael Mann movie or a shaving commercial. Read more »
On the way to Alice In Wonderland, I stopped in a pizzeria. On a big Samsung television, above the soda fountain, there played Robots. It reminded me of the old days when I would seek happiness in a movie like Bolt or Igor.
First of all, why do they make all these movies where everyone talks on cell phones, percolates coffee, wears ties and has female troubles (all the main characters being male)? Only they’re talking robots or fish or bees or frankenstein’s assistants? There is no imagination (Pixar being the exception). Why don’t they get honest and have young humans trying to change the way things are from their apartments in New York or L.A.? Read more »
Ever since Titanic swept the 70th Academy Awards in 1998, I have held very, very little faith in the Oscars. At 16, the injustice of such a trashy, poorly-acted, poorly-written teenage-cryfest of a movie winning out over the obviously far more artistic L.A. Confidential, struck me like a revolting brick to the face, and I remember annoucing to my family, “These awards must be rigged. This is bullshit, and I’m never going to watch these again.”
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I would not call this movie a masterpiece. To say that, I think you would need to give it at least a couple of years and a couple more viewings. But it feels like a masterpiece. Hours after leaving the theater, my mind would return to the French prison where the movie is set; a haunting world impossible to forget. Read more »
Partway through The Ghost Writer, the latest film by Roman Polanski, the title figure (played by Ewan McGregor) stares in a mirror and tells himself not to have sex with the vulnerable woman in the other room. And then he does. Polanski, strangely, plays this as a joke, one of many in a film that works both a superb, traditional thriller and as a grim addition to his oeuvre. Read more »
This is a pretty common story. An olive in a bowl of cherries, something like that; a fish out of water, etc. Recently we have seen this theme in Did You Hear About The Morgans? – a NYC couple (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) get relocated to a small town in Wyoming by the witness protection program – and New In Town – Renée Zellweger is a Miami businesswoman who moves to a small town in Minnesota. I have seen neither of these movies (despite the name of this website); my point is that this is a narrative device for comedies still used today. Moreover, Ruggles of Red Gap took on many forms before 1935. It was a novel, a play, and two silent films, though the most successful was this version here, starring Charles Laughton as an English butler, Marmaduke Ruggles, working in Paris under the Earl of Burnstead, a rather dapper man prone to mumbling, who uses poor Mr. Ruggles as a stake in a poker game. Ruggles is won by a New Money cowboy, Egbert Floud (Charlie Ruggles (the actor’s name is purely coincidental)), and taken away to a small American town: Red Gap, Washington. Before they leave, however, Egbert gets his new decidedly uptight butler drunk to the point where all Ruggles can do is hoot, giggle, and ride Egbert as if Egbert was a horse: something Ruggles learned, of course, from Egbert. Ruggles’ untimely display of periodic tippling causes Egbert’s socially conscious (if not socially paranoid) wife, Effie Floud (Mary Boland) to threaten to terminate her new butler, though she inevitably lets him off the hook and even allows him a morning snifter which she says will solve Ruggles’ hangover, not that she would know firsthand. Read more »
Mongol is a fun bio-pic unencumbered by realism or recent history. Genghis Khan ruled Eurasia so long ago that his story can be built from scratch. Set against gorgeous scenery (shot in China and Kazakhstan), Mongol focuses on how the boy became the conquerer. Read more »
If there is one thing I hate, it’s mediocrity. And boy, is Up in the Air Mediocre. Set adrift without a driving plot, the film leans heavily on George Clooney’s charm. If you are still partial to said charm, you may like this movie. If like me, however, you now find Mr. Clooney unable or unwilling to blend into a film or inhabit a character, stay away.* Read more »
I really don’t think you want to see this.
illwatchanything
Jared Parmenter
Timothy Parfitt
hgish
sdoob