Trash, art, and the movies.
“You make me feel like a better person, and I’m… not a better person,” says Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant) to his girlfriend as she announces she’s leaving him. Indifference is a word that requires more effort to type than the emotion that typifies Tweed’s attitude toward her. He’s of course a caricature of Simon Cowell, the garrulous talent judge of the ubiquitous…
Directed by Clark Johnson (“S.W.A.T.”,”Iron Eagle II”) and written by George Nolfi (“Oceans Twelve”), “The Sentinel” is not a thriller, it’s not a drama, it’s not even a decent crime story. It’s a “star” movie. Note that 50 percent of the theatrical poster’s visual space is occupied by the names of the four main cast members, including Michael Douglas who was an actor once upon a time. The movie begins in the fashion of about…
This is, in a way, a difficult movie to analyze. First, because it’s a conglomeration of only bits and pieces of other movies, and not an entire story in its own right—possessing only slightly more continuity from scene to scene over its predecessors. Second, how do you know when the melodramatic acting and decidedly silly dialogue is actually bad…
“Brick” has every reason to be pretentious. I didn’t realize this going in, and for the first fifteen minutes I felt like I was watching a bad film school rehash of Godard in the most contrived manner. But somewhere along the way, this flagrantly self-affected and at times dementedly jocular piece of art-house trash earned my…
Let it be said that Antonio Banderas can take even an aggressively formulaic movie and turn it into a passable affair—sort of. In this case, he plays dance instructor Pierre Dulaine. From pierredulaine.com, I learn that the real Dulaine studied dance from the age of fourteen in England and by 21 became a member of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, won several international championships, and moved to New York in…
In 1943, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst were convicted of treason by the Nazi regime for their involvement in the White Rose—a resistance movement that opposed the Nazi party’s ideologies. It was not then fully realized by the German public that the Nazis were planning mass extermination of Jews. Thus, this film avoids revisiting…
My first impression was that this film was a shiny rehash of Andrew Niccol’s smug polemic “Lord of War.” I was right. However, oddly, it actually works. In this case, writer/director Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman) takes on the tobacco industry, a ripe target for the kind of deconstruction and criticism for…
So someone figured out that sequels are inherently displeasing to the mind. Thus, we have not “Ice Age 2,” but “Ice Age: The Meltdown.” I can just imagine the umpteen meetings or memos that transpired to execute the change… but, seriously, let’s talk about the….