Christopher Walken’s essential star quality, his absolute uniqueness as a performer, is never more apparent, or welcome, than when he appears in dreck. Even in the worst films, ENVY comes to mind, he is there, effortlessly finding something, anything, in a bad script and worse directing, to which a hapless audience can cling until the… Read More »
2 DAYS IN PARIS
2 DAYS IN PARIS has one of the nicest establishing shots in cinema. From overhead, the audience watches a couple (Adam Goldberg and Julie Delpy) sleeping peacefully on a train heading from Venice to Paris. The narration, by co-star/writer/director Delpy, introduces them as Jack and Marion, traveling Europe after two years together. A tricky time,… Read More »
DELIRIOUS
DELIRIOUS is like a tidy little zen koan from Tom DiCillo. The story is about paparazzi and the celebs that they stalk, but both the comedy and the tragedy in this gentle satire comes from the schizophrenic struggle between public image and reality in those lives. The lesson involves three stories that intertwine by chance… Read More »
GOOD LUCK CHUCK
It’s not like one goes into a film like GOOD LUCK CHUCK with great expectations. And so it is all the more remarkable, dispiriting rather, when even a low bar, a very lowered bar, isn’t met. This flick isn’t just bad, it falls into that rare category of works that are actual harbingers of the… Read More »
HEARTBREAK KID, THE
It takes chutzpah of a particularly flagrant sort to update the Neil Simon/Elaine May classic, THE HEARTBREAK KID. The Farrelly Brothers obviously pack that sort of gumption, taking the droll but deadly humor of the original and rethinking it with their trademark penchant for slapstick and silliness. It may not have the same wry weltschmertz… Read More »
MEET THE ROBINSONS — DVD
MEET THE ROBINSONS is a whiz-bang terrific flight of fancy that is a paean to both the creative impulse that drives inventors, and the boundless optimism that keeps them going in the face of long odds and the skepticism of their less imaginative fellow creatures. Thinking so far outside the box that its very existence… Read More »
MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM
In MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM we discover that neither bright and shiny sets nor silly socks a fun film makes. Sprung from the sadly underfevered imagination of Zach Helm (STRANGER THAN FICTION), this fable is like something imagined by Turgenev during what would have been even for him one of his more bleak interludes. The plot… Read More »
RATATOUILLE — DVD
The only thing better than watching RATATOUILLE in a theater is watching the DVD of RATATOUILLE at home with a lovely big bowl of the eponymous fare on which to dine while watching it. And perhaps a side of toasted cheese and mushrooms. If you’ve seen the film, you’ll get why. The adventures of Remy,… Read More »
WALK HARD — THE DEWEY COX STORY
What SPINAL TAP did to and for the heavy metal documentary, WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY does to and for the musical bio-pic. With a fearless sense of silliness and a savage swipe at the conventions of the genre, it forges a brilliant parody that is relentlessly funny and musically acute. There is not… Read More »
27 DRESSES
27 DRESSES begins as a harmless little romp. It coasts along with a comfortable sort of premise, which lacks originality, but does have the fumbling effervescence of Katherine Heigl as its star. What starts out unremarkably quickly loses its way with writing that falters, dialogue that babbles, and a point of view that vacillates about… Read More »
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