Author Archive

Someone or something, be it the Founding Fathers or merely our lucky stars, deserves thanks for dissent and the freedom we have to express it. In particular Ben Stein should be thanked for making Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

If there is one thing that you may learn from Vantage Point, it is that you should never judge a movie by its trailer.

A horrific tale of ghosts in a spooky house, it is just the sort of movie you would expect to interest Sr. del Toro.

Though the beginning was a touch weak, the movie gets better and better as the story progresses.

The spectacular failure that such a promising movie became leads me to wonder if cinema itself is dying.

Some art is created for its own sake and some art has a purpose beyond entertainment. Rendition, from director Gavin Hood, definitely falls into the latter category. While an intriguing story in its own right, there is also a timely message that the creators wish to deliver to the audience, and it doesn’t take a subtle mind to detect it. The intent is obvious from the title alone.

The saga of Jason Bourne continues with The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installment of the trilogy based on a series of books. Any moderately successful flick is, in today’s movie world, an instant candidate for a sequel, and The Bourne Identity was just that: a moderately successful spy action/mystery vehicle helmed by David Liman [...]

Steven Soderbergh makes it a trilogy with his latest Ocean’s installment, Ocean’s Thirteen. It’s not a bad movie, but like its immediate predecessor it falls far short of the first movie, and for the typical reasons that sequels generally fall short. Not based on action and fighting sequences, the Ocean’s saga relies on [...]

Screaming Masterpiece, a documentary directed by Ari Alexander Ergis Magnusson, is out on DVD. Running just under an hour and a half, it is an overview of Icelandic pop music, concentrating principally on modern music but also delving into ’80’s tunes and even looking at Viking music from centuries ago. The question posed [...]

POTC: At World’s End is a 21st century movie par excellence. More to the point, it is a 21st century sequel par excellence. It falls into the same trap, and I mean exactly the same trap, into which the Matrix sequels fell. Like the Wachowski brothers, Verbinski is a very capable director and so manages to insert a handful of intriguing elements, but not enough to keep the project from being anything other than ordinary.

The newly released Fracture, directed by Gregory Hoblit, is not the first movie to thrive on a contest, whether of wills, fighting prowess or wits, between two main characters. Nor is it the first movie to place Anthony Hopkins in such a situation.

It is absolutely incomprehensible how something like Spiderman 3 happens. The first two movies were hardly masterpieces, but they were good enough to be passable; good enough that, coupled with nothing more than modest expectations, I did not leave the theater angry. Spiderman 3 was produced by experienced professionals, shot by experienced professionals and directed by a competent if unexceptional director, so one would think that there would be a limit to how poor the movie could be. Sure, it might fall short of the first two, like an Olympic high jumper might not clear a bar he can usually jump with regularity, but it can’t be too awful, can it?

When a brother and sister discover a strange box they are unwittingly thrust into key roles in a story spanning centuries and wherein the future is at stake. Inside the box are several strange items, all of which prove to have magical properties, but for a purpose that they themselves must discover. Along the way, the two must overcome a government anti-terrorism unit which mistakes their activities for terrorist acts and find help from some unlikely places. The Last Mimzy, directed by Robert Shaye, is a movie aimed at children. But unlike the best of children’s movies, like E.T. and The Little Mermaid, this one is likely to fall flat with adults.

Five years have passed since the last time a Fincher directed picture graced our silver screens. Like an alcoholic who must resort to drinking other brands when one of his favorites is out of stock, I have had to make do this last half decade. Oh, it hasn’t been such a terrible time: [...]

It is a very rare thing for a highly anticipated film to live up to expectations. Collateral did it a couple years ago and The Others a few years before that. A handful of others have done it or come close, but Zack Snyder’s 300 falls short. Great on images but short [...]

Everyone has a favorite director — but there comes a time when the favorite of the masses must emerge!

The generally acknowledged greatest soccer player of his generation, Zinedine Zidane, (ZIN-uh-deen zee-DAN) was the master of the midfield; a player of uncommon instinct, vision and grace. A solid but not prolific goal scorer, he led his club teams to three European Championship games, (winning one) and his national team to two World Cup [...]

While the basketball world eagerly awaits their March Madness, the cinematic world is on the brink of its own special month. Though it seems that the world is not fully cognizant of what is about to occur, being caught up in the anticipation of one lone film, I think that March, 2007 will produce [...]

Idi Amin, the corrupt and brutal dictator, I say that like there is any other kind, of Uganda once called himself the king of Scotland. Thence came the title of the 1998 debut novel by Giles Foden, and also the title of the 2006 film from director Kevin MacDonald, his first non-documentary feature film. [...]

In making The Good German, Steven Soderbergh not only has made a tribute to the post-war noir films of the mid to late forties, he has made a movie quite literally the old fashioned way: with old fashioned technology from the period and even in the old style. Technologically this means no zooming lenses, [...]