Reviews

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 razing the ghetto. Who’s going on the train. Before we even sit down to Jakob the Liar, we already expect these questions to be answered.

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, yes; with The Insider, no. The next question then is was that effect worth two and a half-plus hours, which is a little trickier to

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 on the week-ends. Some just go see movies like David Fincher’s Fight Club, which, as with Natural Born Killers, gives us vicarious access without the

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 the bats are digital, and–in close-up–bear some serious family resemblance to the little ‘demons’ in The Gate. Which is part of the fun: horror is

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, include lots of bad luck. Les Mayfield’s Blue Streak does, over and over and over. As a result, it is funny, the same kind of

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 story, are nevertheless fun to watch for all the head kicks and double back flips. Or, take Fair Game, a shoddy movie with very well-choreographed

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 down to its most ridiculous: the American soldier fighting the Iraqi soldier for possession of one small little hill (mound) in the middle of the

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 little in-jokes, can appreciate the asides, the irony, etc. To look at it another way, a work only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it’s been

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 so much to sports but to the main character’s life situation. Thus winning or losing the game means a little more. It’s a common enough

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 be just new enough to work. The west coast was a cakewalk for Chili Palmer and his in your face, loan-shark approach. It’s similarly easy

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 reprehensible and sympathetic, the endearing used car salesman. Eddie Murphy’s at his best when allowed to do variations on his always-one-step-ahead -of-you-and talking-twice-as-fast Axel Foley.

shyamalan’s way In Speilberg’s Always, the dead hang around for awhile, tying up the loose ends of their lives. In Jacob’s Ladder, the dead hang around in a similar manner, having to make peace before they can move on. Ditto with Beetlejuice, High Plains Drifter, Ghost, etc. It’s all about preparation. In that regard the

hoosiers on ice In 1976 Rocky said it once and for all: \\\”I can’t beat him. But that don’t bother me. The only thing I want to do is to go the distance, that’s all.\\\” The determined underdog, the noble nobody, the champion-in-waiting. These are the things we love. Mystery, Alaska (re)delivers them, packaged nicely

looking closer Most movies willingly yield to even minimal analysis–fall apart in your hands, into a set of easily identifiable conventions, character types, etc. Not so with director Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, the story of what the suburban American dream looks like minus the veneer, the ‘image’ of success each of the characters is either

simple math Movies about serial killers are typically from some detective’s POV as he and we try to figure out just who the serial killer is. Why is it like this? Simply because if the audience isn’t seduced into some sort of sympathetic relationship with the ostensible main character of the movie, that movie doesn’t

a league of their own The trailer didn’t lie: Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) has captured Captain Amazing (wholesome Greg Kinnear), leaving a superhero-sized void in the skies of Champion City. Enter Mr Furious, the Bowler, the Shoveler, Blue Raja & Co. (Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, William H. Macy, and Hank Azaria) to fill that void

high infidelity The structure of Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut is older than cinema itself, but hardly new to it: an everyman type encounters boundary situation X, which draws him into some analogue of the unconscious, where he journeys, learns, etc, and then that man is reborn. It’s the Odysseus monomyth. Most recently

people in the mist In comic books, when you go live with the animals for a couple of years you come back a super-hero; in Instinct, that’s half the case: ‘Ape-man’ Dr. Ethan Powell (silverback Anthony Hopkins) does come back from the Rwandan jungle with ‘super’ powers—an animal ferocity–but, as he’s in the land of

blown away When someone’s paranoid in a movie and no believes him or her, that paranoia will be justified. It’s cliche. Similarly, when the neighbors are perfect, they aren’t. In Arlington Road, Michael Faraday, (Jeff Bridges) teacher of an American-Terrorism course, suspects his neighbors just might be terrorists. And no one believes him. And this

love in the uk Notting Hill opens very British, very proper, with William Thacker (Hugh Grant) introducing himself with a casual voice-over, then taking us on an establishing stroll through his neighborhood, his home, Notting Hill. During this walk we learn a) his wife has left him; b) he runs a bookstore which specializes in

peripherally envisioned What gets you in a haunted house movie are the quiet moments, when you expect something to happen. A good haunted house movie incubates this, stacks up a few false positives, then knocks them down all at once in a crash of cymbals, only to start the whole process over. Think The Shining,

not a space odyssey The X-Files taught us that alien colonization won’t be loud like Independence Day, but insipient, like Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, all that. More They Live than War of the the Worlds. The trailer establishes all this with minimal effort, too, as it’s already conventional knowledge. And we are hungry for it,

the last american virgin In Happiness everything revolved around a young boy’s ejaculation, and we all kind of looked away and accepted it. In American Pie, happiness is ejaculation, only now there are enough puerile body fluid jokes that we can’t look away. Too, though, the trailer didn’t mislead us. With a logline like ‘There’s

in the absence of shag In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, set in the 90s, Austin’s arch-nemesis Dr. Evil is laughably stuck in the 60s, demanding a million dollars to ransom the world, etc. Now it’s the second installment, though, and, to keep it interesting, Mike Myers has turned it all around: back in

sputnik with legs The dilemma for all the ‘tin men’ in literature/media has always been Do I have a heart or not? From Oz to Star Trek to director Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. But The Iron Giant is so much more, too. It opens with a meteor (the Iron Giant, here) hurtling through space,

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 into 2 hrs. Entrapment is all of this and more: it even has the original Bond–Sean Connery–playing high-stakes cat thief Mac. More or less the

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 there in the unconscious, waiting. What The Blair Witch Project does is take us back to those woods, and then leave us there with three

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 Marhsall’s Runaway Bride, Maggie (Julia Roberts) and Ike (Richard Gere), are earmarked early on for such a happy ending by how opposite they seem to

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 look at it another way, the cartoon grew up with its initial audience, that is, the audience grew up to make their own cartoon. But,

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 we start with is pretty convincing, or, is made even more convincing by Armin Mueller-Stahl’s Hannon Fuller character, whose nervous eyes, hesitant accent, and slight

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 reigned and Johnny Mnemonic was born into the neuroscape of virtual reality; not long after, virtual reality gave birth itself, and Russell Crowe got to