I had an interesting conversation with one of my fellow movie critic friends on the way out of “300.” He was just as excited to see it as I was, but afterwards, the first word he used to describe it was “lame,” that it was nothing but slo-mo swordplay and green screen work. I found this puzzling, since every trailer for the movie shows nothing but slo-mo swordplay and green screen work. Wasn’t the movie, then, exactly what the ads – the very things that got him so excited in the first place – proclaimed it to be? And if…
Author: David Medsker
It is to the great credit of “Zodiac” that they were able to wring any sort of tension out of a murder mystery that has never been solved. The problem is that the movie spends far too much time not solving the crimes. I overheard one of my peers calling the movie “necessarily long.” I’m assuming there was an ‘un’ in front of that that I simply didn’t hear. The story begins in 1969, and Jake Gyllenhaal is Robert Graysmith, a rookie cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Robert starts working for the paper at the same time that a…
“The Number 23” can’t seem to figure out whether it wants to be a paranoid thriller, a kinky murder mystery, or an M. Night Shyamalan-style Hook Movie. In the end, it’s all of these things, but it’s not any one of those things long enough to matter. New Line has a history of mucking up movies like this. “Frequency,” the 2000 drama starring Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel, suffered from a similar problem. It started off as a heartwarming father-and-son time travel movie, and then morphs into a hunt for a serial killer. These kinds of movies are clearly not…
You really have to put movies like “Ghost Rider” in a different pack than the others. It’s so bad that it’s actually kind of awesome. Anyone who expects anything from a movie like “Ghost Rider,” comic fanboy or not, is just setting themselves up for trouble. However, if you go into it thinking, “This is going to be the worst movie ever made,” there’s a certain vindication in enjoying its spectacular badness that could possibly overcome you before all is said and done. Of course, you’ll still walk out of the theater thinking, “That was one of the worst movies…
There is a terrific little movie somewhere inside “Music and Lyrics,” one that lovingly pokes fun at songwriters and the people who worship them. Sadly, this isn’t it. For a romantic comedy, it’s not particularly romantic, nor is it as funny as it has the potential to be. The ingredients are certainly there: few actors meet cuter than Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and the music was supervised by a member of Fountains of Wayne. However, writer/director Marc Lawrence, despite an abundance of experience serving as what appears to be Sandra Bullock’s manservant (check his IMDb filmography), loses control of…
As we were walking out of the ‘Romeo Human and Juliet Werewolf’ movie “Blood & Chocolate,” my fellow critic friends and I were debating what kind of movie it was. It has a horror element, but isn’t scary. It has a forbidden-love subplot, but is rather sexless. Then our resident bookworm told us that the source material on which the movie is based is a teen lit book by Annette Curtis Klause, and suddenly it all made sense. Of course it’s based on a teen lit story. That explains why the violence and language are toned down, and why the…
You know things are bad when you actually wish Michael Bay would direct more movies than he produces. The man’s gotten positively fat while serving as producer to a slew of horror remakes (“The Amityville Horror,” two “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies) that are nonessential at best and exploitative at worst (this whole ‘all horror, all the time’ thing needs to go, and soon). His latest money grab, a remake of the 1986 thriller “The Hitcher,” is his most nonessential remake yet. A murderous hitchhicker? That’s about as relevant as a movie about a killer milkman or, as our own Jeff…
The catch with making a movie like “Blood Simple” is that everyone wants you to make it again, and again, and again. History has since shown that the Coen brothers are not fond of doing anything twice, so while it now makes perfect sense that they would choose to follow “Simple” with a batshit crazy comedy, no one saw it coming at the time, and how could they? No one had made a movie like “Raising Arizona” since…well, has anyone made a movie quite like “Raising Arizona”? With enough quirk to give Diablo Cody a seizure and plunging greater emotional…
There is something to be said for a movie that exceeds your expectations despite its near-total lack of surprises. If you were anything like BE movie critic Jason Zingale, you saw the concept for “Freedom Writers” and said, “Hmmm, ‘Dead Poets Society of the Dangerous Minds’” (which is about seven words short of becoming a Panic! at the Disco song title, but that’s another subject). In truth, that sums up “Freedom Writers” almost exactly, but thanks to a sharp script and some finely tuned performances by both students and teacher, the movie rises above its more predictable trappings to deliver…
First, a quick chat about movie etiquette. It is not enough that your cell phone is on vibrate. It should be off, period. No one is so important that their phone must be on at all times. If you must be reachable at all times, you shouldn’t go to movies. Seems simple enough, right? I thought so, at any rate. The woman in front of me, however, decided to spend the entire movie sending text messages. Her screen was very bright, and it distracted all five of the people I was with. Had she not been there with her children…