Lend me your ears: I come neither to bury All the King’s Men nor to praise it. Forget what you’ve heard: this is not a trainwreck of a film, it is not the most bloated and hackneyed film of 2006, it is not an incoherent film with no t a trace of political knowledge. It […]
If it’s true that Jet Li has starred in his last martial arts film, then it is reasonable to assume that Fearless is in part an audition for future dramatic roles. In which case, it is a very poor audition indeed. Fearless, whose English-language title has nothing to do with the content of the film […]
A singular example of a film that exists solely for its lead performance, which is brilliant, Sherrybaby is an extremely dismal experience. The plot in short: Sherry Swanson gets out of prison after three years, clean for the first time in ages, and thrilled to reconnect with her daughter. Her brother and sister-in-law are both […]
What Michael Moore hath wrought, part 917: a documentary whose star is its director, and just about everything wrong with it stems from that fact. Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a muckraking exposé of the Motion Picture Association of America, and a fairly successful attack on the hypocritical and sex-phobic ratings […]
In five years, I will be just about exactly Zach Braff’s age in The Last Kiss, and if I act like he does in the film, I hope my dear friends will have the good sense to kill me in my sleep. Based on an Italian film I have not seen (and this is the […]
All of Zhang Yimou’s films, even his recent martial arts epics, are ultimately intimate stories about the individual set in contrast to society. Not necessarily in opposition; but Zhang’s films usually explore the ways in which social animals are forced to behave in isolation. This has never been more apparent than in his latest film […]
Who to blame for the stylish mess that is The Black Dahlia? Brian De Palma seems the likeliest candidate, as every frame drips with his stylistic tics and quirks, and it’s obvious that he’s not really interested in telling any sort of “story.” Or perhaps Josh Friedman, whose adaptation of James Ellroy’s book retains unwieldy […]
Even by the generous standards of the martial arts genre, the new Tony Jaa vehicle The Protector has an extremely silly plot: Kham, as a young man, is trained in the traditional style of fighting that his villagers have used for centuries to protect their royal elephants. When his aged father attempts to meet the […]
The first thing to do is ignore the advertising that makes Hollywoodland look like the latest in a long string of Los Angeles period mysteries. To be sure, it is a period piece, and a great one at that; and one of its two protagonists is a classically cynical gumshoe who’s only interested in the […]
On paper, and just about everywhere else (including, once upon a time, this weblog), it’s pretty easy to dismiss Crank as “D.O.A.-meets-Speed.” There’s no question as to why this should be the case: a hitman wakes up to find a DVD informing him that he’s been poisoned, and if his adrenaline drops too low, he […]
I feel somewhat guilty every time I look over the ol’ blog for the last few weeks and note how irregularly I’ve been posting, and how indifferent those posts tend to be. I will not excuse myself but explain this, yet again, as the result of my job – I enjoy writing but I have […]
Generally, I try to defend Neil LaBute from charges of misogyny, using the admittedly dubious argument that he dislikes everybody irrespective of gender. And while I will continue to insist that In the Company of Men is an example of equal-opportunity misanthropy, it’s pretty hard to look at the LaBute-scripted and -directed remake of The […]
