Time is cruel. There was a time when “A Nightmare on Elm Street” was the scariest, movie, ever. And while the movie still delivers some genuine thrills, the sad fact is that Wes Craven’s landmark horror film has not aged well. This, from the guy who listened to music every night when he went to sleep on a boom box…just like Johnny Depp does here. I think I fell asleep at 4:00am the night I first saw this movie. The movie begins, natch, with a dream sequence, where Tina (Amanda Wyss, a.k.a. Beth from “Better Off Dead…”) is chased by…
Author: David Medsker
“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” is explosively funny and positively maddening. Musical biopics have been begging for a good thrashing, so the movie has an unlimited number of jokes at its disposal. The problem is that the movie careens between “This Is Spinal Tap” genius and “Scary Movie” pandering, sometimes within the same scene. In their attempt to tell every joke available to them, they forgot that some of them are not worth telling. John C. Reilly is Dewey Cox, the younger brother of a piano prodigy who dies at Dewey’s hands during a barnyard accident. Dewey’s father (the…
The glass-half-full take on “Alvin and the Chipmunks” is that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The glass-half-empty take is that it’s still not very good. The kids will surely be entertained, and the movie has a surprisingly wholesome message, but the adults will be smacking their foreheadsover the way that the movie all but ignores reality, and for no real reason. The movie stars Jason Lee as Dave Seville, an advertising executive who moonlights as a songwriter. Dave’s college friend and Jett Records president Ian (David Cross) rejects his latest song and tells…
The latest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel “I Am Legend” is pretty much what you would expect from a modern-day remake of the story, both for better and for worse. You can practically hear the pitch session: “It’s ’Cast Away’ meets ’28 Days Later’!” No wonder Will Smith signed on to play the lead. He’ll get plenty of Oscar Winning Moments with no one but a German shepherd in a position to upstage him, and he gets to bust a cap at the same time. Who wouldn’t sign on to play that part, especially once they see how the…
Let’s get the talk of the controversy out of the way, shall we? Catholic groups have been up in arms about New Line’s decision to adapt “The Golden Compass,” the first of atheist author Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, decrying the books as anti-Christian. As a Christian, I personally take no issue with his message, but am appalled by the leaden delivery of said message, as it made for some tedious viewing. It certainly has an anti-establishment tone to it, but what’s wrong with that? If there is anything to fear about this movie, it’s the notion of being…
Sweeney Todd and Tim Burton: you don’t find spirits more kindred than that. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in the hands of another director. Would anyone else have seen how much humor is embedded in Steven Sondheim’s song book? Would anyone else have been willing to portray the lead character in such an unflattering light? Lastly, would anyone have the nerve to make a musical with almost no color? In the end, the answers to those questions are meaningless. The only question worth asking is: what on earth took Burton so long…
While fans of the cancelled Fox series “Futurama” surely shouted “Good news, everyone!” when they learned that the show would be returning in the form of four straight-to-DVD movies, they would be wise to temper their expectations a tad before viewing “Bender’s Big Score,” and it is not for the reason you might suspect. The problem isn’t layoff fatigue, but rather that the movie tries way too hard to tie in as many plots from the TV series as possible to create one monster story. The end result is indeed ambitious, but needlessly complicated. The story begins with the Planet…
Not since Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” has a movie left me so emotionally drained that I could barely speak. “The Mist” is old-school horror at its finest: it is a relentless, brutally intense monster movie that exposes the recent installments to the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises for the kiddie-ride amusement park silliness that they are. Writer/director Frank Darabont made a name for himself as a brilliant adapter of Stephen King’s dramatic work, but his first foray into horror is nothing short of astonishing. As an added bonus, Darabont cooked up a definitive ending for King’s open-ended novella, and…
You’re a heartless, soulless bastard if you don’t like “August Rush.” The story of an orphan whose parents don’t even know he exists, who uses his natural gift for music to call his musician parents to him? That has “heart-warming tearjerker” written all over it, what’s wrong with you? For the record, there is nothing wrong with you. “August Rush” is brimming with potential – the lead, after all, is Freddie Highmore, the Cutest Kid on the Planet – but the movie is undone by a complete lack of confidence in the story they’re telling. I can’t remember the last…
There were so many ways that “Enchanted” could have gone wrong. Poking fun at the wonderful world of Disney is not exactly uncharted territory – the original “Shrek” was little more than a big ‘fuck you’ to Jeffrey Katzenberg’s former employers – but when the studio doing the poking is Disney itself, well, now you’re walking a particularly slippery slope. If you don’t go far enough, you run the risk of looking like you can’t take a joke. Go too far, and you’re being disrespectful to the qualities that made people love Disney movies in the first place. It is…