In 1994, Ron Howard was one movie away from director purgatory. No, you say, surely not the Oscar winning director of “A Beautiful Mind” and the man in charge of the sure-to-make-jillions “The Da Vinci Code.” Why, he’s a national treasure! He’s a national treasure now. In 1994, he was the man who followed “Parenthood” and “Backdraft” with the ill-conceived Cruise/Kidman movie “Far and Away” and the god-awful “The Paper.” One more “Paper,” and he, not Rob Reiner, is directing “Alex and Emma.” But he didn’t make another “Paper,” at least not right away. (He waited five years, and called…
Author: David Medsker
You’re going to read lots of things about “The Ring Two,” one of the most needless sequels in the long history of needless sequels. You’ll read that it’s not that scary, and that is definitely true. But the most important thing you need to know about the movie is that it completely invalidates everything about its predecessor. “The Ring” (2002) was truly thrilling, and its tidy ending left little wiggle room for a second installment. For “The Ring Two,” it appears that the filmmakers decided, for the sake of convenience, to throw out all of the established rules of engagement,…
It seems unfair to say that “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” is a letdown, but a letdown it is. For all it gets right – the art direction is spectacular, the casting is inspired, and the shuffling of the first three books into one story was handled remarkably well – there is one thing fatally missing from the goings on, which is a sense of genuine peril. For all of the bad things that happen to the protagonists, and there are a lot of them, it never feels as though anything is really at stake. Is it so…
“Ocean’s Twelve” is a movie that knows it doesn’t have to try very hard. While those involved with the film are engaging in more trademark rapid-fire improv, they’re hamstrung by a setup that’s far beneath them, yet do not seem concerned by their dilemma. This is not to say the movie doesn’t have its share of thrilling or amusing moments. It is just that those moments are mired in a hazy setup, murky camera work – Steven Soderbergh didn’t direct the movie so much as he caught it on film – and wrapped up with no payoff whatsoever. The movie…
“Team America: World Police” spends every second of its 105-minute running time walking the fine line between clever and stupid. For every spot on parody, there is a joke so hopelessly desperate, we’re left wondering if this is really the same team that made the brilliant “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.” That movie, like this one, took no prisoners and had no patience for propriety. This movie, unlike that one, approaches its targets less as a sharpshooter than as a 10 year old with an Uzi, pointing and spraying and mowing down whoever is unlucky enough to be nearby.…
“The Village” is so spectacularly bad, in an Ed Wood/MST3K kind of way, that it’s almost likable. The execution is so deadly serious, so solemn, that it’s as if the thought never once crossed the minds of the cast or crew that the movie they were making was complete and utter garbage. The writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan, is obviously a talented filmmaker; his “Sixth Sense” will stand as one of the most beloved movies of the last 20 years. But where his other movies were solid with a major flaw in one part or another – “Unbreakable” had a great…
Watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” is like watching “Best In Show,” “Family Guy” and the Pin Pals episode of “The Simpsons” back to back, although the sum is not nearly as good as the individual parts. Some moments are sublime. Others are shockingly lazy. Most of the material is horribly, and deliberately, inappropriate. There are also cameos galore. The end result is sometimes side splittingly funny, but overall wildly uneven. Vince Vaughn stars as Peter La Fleur, a not too terribly ambitious man who runs a small gym called Average Joe’s that is on the verge of financial ruin.…
The sound you heard when Chris Columbus decided to step down as director of the “Harry Potter” movies was the cinephile quadrant of J. K. Rowling’s fan base letting out an exuberant squeal of joy. The first two installments of the “Harry Potter” series, helmed by Columbus, were so terribly, excruciatingly faithful to the source material that watching the movies was like having the books read to you by Abraham Simpson: they were long winded, with all of the emphasis placed on the unimportant details, and ultimately rather dull. Not so, this one. Director Alfonso Cuarón (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”)…
Any movie that dares to discuss a hot button topic like global warming is going to get some press, but it’s safe to say that no one expected Moveon.org to rally behind “The Day After Tomorrow” and declare it “the movie George W. Bush doesn’t want you to see.” This is, of course, preposterous. If there is one thing Roland Emmerich’s movies are unquestionably not, it’s important. In “Independence Day”, he had two characters disarm an alien race with a computer virus. In “Stargate”, he took cross-dressing Jaye Davidson from “The Crying Game” and made him a sun god. All…
A few years ago, it was generally agreed that director Michael Bay (“Armageddon”, “Bad Boys”) was the devil, that his movies were flashy but soulless, pretty but vacant. The big concern among movie lovers, of course, was that the devil would mate and reproduce, spawning a legion of likeminded directors that would lower the standards of moviemaking forevermore. Indeed, that would certainly explain guys like Simon West (“The General’s Daughter”), Dominic Sena (“Gone in Sixty Seconds”) and Jan DeBont (“The Haunting”) getting regular work. The devil’s favored son, however, has to be Stephen Sommers. His “Mummy” movies were high tech…