Trash, art, and the movies.
I think I should get this out of the way first… Is “Zathura,” based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg, a retread of “Jumanji,” also based on a book by Van Allsburg? Yes. Will kids care? Probably not. “Jumanji” is now ten years old, and few in the target audience for this film will have been barely able to remember its predecessor, if they were even born yet. Even if they were, kids have a propensity to adore recycled themes…
The film’s title, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” seems to have been ripped straight from the tagline of any number of “psyched up” music videos or basketball shoe commercials—all invented by white people sitting in the boardroom trying to think of ways to appeal to white, suburban youths’ stereotypes about black culture. The target audience for this film is so young, they…
“Jarhead,” a film directed by Sam Mendes, is based on a book by the same Anthony Swofford, regarding his experiences as a scout/sniper. The film is set in the early 1990’s, just before Operation: Desert Storm. I’m struggling to think of a way to move forward with this review, if only because the film doesn’t have a narrative. It consists mostly of vignettes, well, no, not even… call them, perhaps, a series of moments in which…
The problem with this approach is that they were using the wrong inspiration. While the Dreamworks approach works in “Shrek,” it really didn’t work in “Shark Tale” or “Madagascar.” Given they had the master storytellers of Pixar in their backyard, one wonders why Disney didn’t watch a few commentary tracks to learn from the…
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…