Perhaps it’s because I’m a generation his junior. I don’t have the experience of understanding within the context of that time the noir-influenced French New Wave, or the Spanish-Italian genre that spawned the Agente .077 series (a spoof on James Bond) or the Duccio Tessari feature of the same name as this film by Shane Black. My awareness of that genre is defined by the culture in which I grew up, as opposed to…
There appear to be two different movies occurring at the same time in Gore Verbinski’s “The Weather Man.” One film is about David Spritz (Nicolas Cage), a Chicago weather anchor, whose career is interrupted by his family and his Pulitzer-prize winning father, Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine), by whom his sense of substantive accomplishment is vastly overshadowed. The other film is about a family’s post-divorce struggles, the…
There’s little reason to make a sequel except money, the prospect of which isn’t extraordinarily promising as second efforts go. I keep thinking to myself, “They could have started from scratch, even with the same plot, different characters,” but I’m forgetting two things: 1) How heavily studios bank on star-driven franchises and 2) the scarcity of original ideas. So here we…
Mirabelle, barely able to pay her $40,000 in student loans, meets Jeremy at the laundromat. They don’t hit it off so much as they find no other social engagements interrupting their opportunity for dating and a botched attempt at casual sex. Just when Jeremy is revealed to be not merely eccentric, but (surprise!) an eccentric slob, we meet Ray Porter. Porter buys a pair of satin gloves from Mirabelle, and then, in what is certainly not the last dishonest method he will…