27
April
2007
Kowalski is delivering the star of the movie, the white 1970 Dodge Challenger, from Colorado to San Francisco. Pumped up on speed (the drug, not velocity), he decides to drive it as fast as he can. Kowalski is the hero with a mysterious past that is slowly revealed in flashbacks over the course of the film. The dialog, frankly, is rather substandard. But the movie makes up for it with the action, stunts, cinematography, music, and speed.
The cops chase Kowalski (Barry Newman) through each state. Super Soul, Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles), a blind black DJ at a radio station, becomes his guide. No one understands why Kowalski is doing this but he becomes a recognized hero. People along the way sometimes help him out. It becomes a counter-culture spiritual journey through the desert southwest. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Action
15
April
2007
Like any Bond film, Casino Royale is given context not only by the period in which it was made, but by the films that directly preceded it. The Brosnan films to which Casino Royale is the heir slowly disintegrated from enjoyable camp to not-so-enjoyable schlock, the nadir of which may have been the casting of Denise Richards as hotpants-clad nuclear physicist Christmas Jones. Though, in all fairness, at least Christmas Jones was memorable in some way, if only memorably awful — in writing this review, I was starkly reminded how little I can tell the last three (or was it four?) Bond films apart.
Casino Royale is a much-needed “reboot” of the Bond franchise, and infuses the Bond mythos — which had become weighed down with painful puns, preposterous scripts, and an increasingly obvious lack of self-awareness — into a new, stripped-down, simplified Bond for a new century.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Drama, Action
7
April
2007
Grindhouse (Rodriguez & Tarantino, 2007) Watching Grindhouse, it was clear to me who was the one with the big ego: his name wasn’t Robert Rodriguez. While Rodriguez settled for a blast-from-the-past film-to-film transfer, Tarantino made a Tarantino film - probably his most peculiar one yet, and one that, if anything, established once and for all his auteur status as a film director.
The double feature began with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. No, rewind that. It began with fake prevues of non-existent films, notably ‘Machete’, a Mexican outlaw film that was hilarious in brief and probably nauseous in full length (Rodriguez entertained the idea of making a real film out of this; to that I can only say, to paraphrase another brilliant fake prevue, ‘Don’t'). The two directors went to great length to recreate effects of cheap films in cheap grindhouse tradition: cheesy prevues of exploitative films, cheap advertisement, scratches, oddly coloured film sections, missing reels, etc. were all there in all their glory. That was the homage part, a remake of sort of the grindhouse pictures. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Articles, Reviews, Action, Horror/Thriller
5
April
2007
Fortunately, the title of this review isn’t a complete spoiler for Hilary Swank’s latest movie, The Reaping. The plot is, in a general sense, a carbon copy of the Hammer Films classic, The Wicker Man (1973). But not as unintentionally hilarious. Rest assured the film has a surprise twist-and-shout ending. A “surprise” meaning that there is, in fact, a surprise that you see coming about 20 minutes into the film. A “twist” because, of course, there is a twist. And, there is a shout at the end. By you, the audience. Usually something along the lines of, “Oh, gimme a break!” as you leave the theater.
“Join me! Kill Nicolas Cage and we will rule the horror genre together!” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Reviews, Horror/Thriller
