Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Monday, July 14th, 2025
July 15, 2005
WEDDING CRASHERS is kinda like an old nemesis of mine. I reviewed it very negatively on The Ain’t It Cool News twenty years ago and though mostly people believed me there were some talkbackers who also saw it in preview screenings who got kinda mad at me. It wasn’t as controversial as my THE TRANSFORMERS pan or anything but I was applying a similar (in retrospect overblown) destructive fury to it – the headline was “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS.” It was being hailed as a new comedy benchmark, or a return to the raunchy R-rated comedy, but I swore it would fade instantly. I made a challenge to one guy to meet back in two years and see if he still considered it a “comedic gem.”
If we had followed through on that bet I’m sure I would’ve lost. Its popularity lasted at least five years, which I can clock by realizing in hindsight that this movie is the reason my wife’s younger cousins asked us to play “Shout” by The Isley Brothers at our wedding. But by then THE HANGOVER had come out and I think it quickly replaced WEDDING CRASHERS as the bro comedy of record (no judgment for that – I’d say it’s a funnier movie). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Cooper, Christopher Walken, David Dobkin, Dwight Yoakam, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour, Keir O'Donnell, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Rebecca De Mornay, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 5 Comments »
Friday, July 11th, 2025
July 8, 2005
This particular DARK WATER is the Hollywood/English-language remake of the 2002 J-horror movie from THE RING director Hideo Nakata (and based on a short story by the same author, Koji Suzuki). In 2005 I had the earlier movie fresh on my mind to compare this to, but now I came to it fresh, because I barely remember either of them. In fact I got this mixed up with DREAM HOUSE and kept expecting Daniel Craig to show up.
I did remember that it stars Jennifer Connelly (DARK CITY) and is gloomy and rainy. Connelly plays Dahlia Williams, who grew up in Seattle but the weather has apparently followed her into her adult life in New York City. She’s in the middle of a not-very-friendly custody battle with ex-husband Kyle (Dougray Scott, the guy who didn’t play Wolverine because MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 went over schedule) who wants her to stay close to his apartment in Jersey City, but she finds a place on Roosevelt Island. She’s not happy about it either but it’s cheap and near what she says is a good elementary school for their daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade, later in ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Camryn Manheim, Dougray Scott, ghosts, Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Perla Haney-Jardine, Pete Postlethwaite, Rafael Yglesias, remakes, remakes of J-horror movies, Tim Roth, Walter Salles
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 5 Comments »
Thursday, July 10th, 2025
July 8, 2005
FANTASTIC FOUR is one of the more pure artifacts of its time that we’ve encountered in this retrospective so far. While BATMAN BEGINS was pushing forward and innovating new approaches to comic book movies, this represents a studio (20th Century Fox) following, formulating and second-guessing their way into a flavorless, impact-less nothing of a super hero adaptation.
My feelings haven’t changed on this one – I thought it was laughable at the time, which I believe was the general consensus. But it was a hit, had a sequel that was a hit, presumably has people who are fond of it, though I’ve never met them. I’d say this is a better example of a “no cultural footprint” movie than AVATAR ever was. It’s about to get its second reboot and I don’t hear anyone calling for a Jessica Alba cameo (though come to think of it that would be cool). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Hamish Linklater, Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Julian McMahon, Kerry Washington, Laurie Holden, Maria Menounos, Mark Frost, Michael Chiklis, Michael France, Simon Kinberg, Tim Story
Posted in Reviews, Comic strips/Super heroes | 23 Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2025
I went and saw Danny Boyle’s 28 YEARS LATER on opening day, two-plus weeks ago. I’ve seen a few other movies I’ve enjoyed since then, but I think this one might’ve dug into me a little deeper. It’s odd and imperfect, but that’s kinda what I like about it. When I thought about a new followup to 28 DAYS LATER and 28 WEEKS LATER I thought “okay, yeah, that could be pretty cool.” But it turns out to be something way more interesting than what I pictured.
I enjoyed going in with no clue what the shape of the story was gonna be, but I guess you’re agreeing to forgo that option by reading this, so here goes. It’s kind of like two chapters (or connected short stories?) with a wraparound. The chapters both start at Lindisfarne, a small island of zombie-apocalypse survivors that can only be accessed via a causeway during low tide. They have a rule that you can leave the island but if you don’t return nobody is allowed to go looking for you. You’re on your own. As part of a rite of passage – but a couple years ahead of schedule – 12-year-old Spike (amazing newcomer Alfie Williams) is taken to the mainland by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, SAVAGES) to bow-hunt his first zombie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alex Garland, Alfie Williams, Anthony Dod Mantle, Chi Lewis-Parry, Danny Boyle, Edvin Ryding, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
M3GAN 2.0 is an impressive sequel because of how thoroughly it avoids repeating the format of part 1.0. It’s not even the same genre – more straight up sci-fi thriller than killer doll horror – but it feels of a piece by having the same joyful sense of absurdity. I laughed at its audacity to open as a straight up action movie – imagine if CHILD’S PLAY 2 opened with the infiltration of a terrorist compound on the Turkish-Iranian border! U.S. Army Colonel Sattler (Timm Sharp, KING OF THE ANTS) watches remotely from a war room, bragging that his agent Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno, High Fidelity) is in fact a highly advanced android on loan to Saudia Arabia to skirt laws. But just as they’re celebrating a successful test run Amelia executes the scientist she’s supposed to capture, steals his biological weapons and turns off her tracking. She’s gone rogue.
Then we get an info dump on our part 1 characters, now living in fake San Francisco instead of fake Seattle. Gemma (Allison Williams, GET OUT), genius roboticist/flawed aunt whose artificially intelligent doll creation Megan went on a killing spree, has spun her infamy into a successful career as an author and AI regulation advocate in partnership with her new boyfriend, cybersecurity expert Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari, featured player on SNL season 47). She still works with Tess (Jen Van Epps, 1 episode Power Rangers Dino Fury) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez, 80 FOR BRADY), but instead of electronic toys they’re trying to make useful and ethical things like an exo-skeleton for the disabled. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akela Cooper, Allison Williams, Amie Donald, Aristotle Athari, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Gerard Johnstone, Ivanna Sakhno, James Wan, Jemaine Clement, Jen Van Epps, Jenna Davis, Timm Sharp, Violet McGraw
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2025
June 29, 2005
Steven Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS (original review)(2013 Summer Flashback review) follows the BATMAN BEGINS pattern for me: loved it at the time, loved it on rewatches, but watched it now and still found myself thinking holy shit, I forgot how good this is. In the set up it’s almost JAWS-good – the beautiful look and sense of place, the natural and economical ways it sets up these people and their relationships, the dread about what horrors are coming even though honestly I wouldn’t mind hanging out longer in this normality that’s about to be interrupted.
Tom Cruise’s character Ray Ferrier kind of seems like the inevitable results of living as one of the charming dicks he played when he was younger – regular Yankees-hat-wearing, working class guy, pretty likable, but fucked up his marriage and now lives alone in a little place in New Jersey. Definitely a deadbeat in the parenting department, and isn’t disciplined enough to get his shit together (until now, when it really counts, during an alien invasion). (Spoiler.) We first see him operating a crane at the docks in Brooklyn, it looks pretty challenging and his boss (Peter Gerety, Homicide: Life on the Streets) seems to think he’s the best at it, but it’s still funny when he punches out and roars into traffic in his Mustang like he’s convinced he’s the coolest motherfucker who ever lived.
Turns out his reckless driving is for a different reason: he was supposed to be home at 8 when his ex-wife Mary Ann (Mirando Otto, HUMAN NATURE) drops off the kids to stay with him during her trip to Boston. He pretends he thought it was 8:30 and doesn’t even say he’s sorry, so it’s not that surprising his teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin, TAKING LIVES) hates him, doesn’t acknowledge him, won’t take off his headphones for him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dakota Fanning, David Alan Basche, David Koepp, H.G. Wells, Josh Friedman, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Morgan Freeman, Peter Gerety, Rick Gonzalez, Steven Spielberg, Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 33 Comments »
Monday, June 30th, 2025
Somehow the Australian director Sean Byrne only has three movies. There was THE LOVED ONES (2009) and THE DEVIL’S CANDY (2015) and now a whole ten years later he has DANGEROUS ANIMALS. I liked all three of these, but this is the first one I caught in a theater, which required some initiative because it only lasted here a week. If you missed it you can watch it on VOD and it will eventually be on Shudder and I assume on disc.
The title refers to 1) sharks, 2) a maniac who feeds people to sharks for kicks and 3) (arguably/poetically) the protagonist, who we hope has the killer instinct to survive numbers one and two.
This is not as mean or hopeless as WOLF CREEK, but it reminds me of that movie because it creates a very Australian slasher in a very Australian setting. Instead of the outback this is the Gold Coast, it’s all surfing and sharks, and like WOLF CREEK it has a really knock out, darkly funny performance by the actor playing the killer. Even better, that actor is the once-mocked and underappreciated Jai Courtney. Everything about this movie is good, but he’s the main reason to watch it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Ella Newton, Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney, Josh Heuston, Sean Byrne, sharks
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 7 Comments »
Thursday, June 26th, 2025
June 24, 2005
In my (mostly embarrassing) review on The Ain’t It Cool News, I jokingly called George A. Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD “the actual, genuine most anticipated movie of the summer,” despite all the excitement over the Batman one and the Star Wars one. I don’t know if that was true even for me, but it was certainly a long-awaited event. In the review I mentioned there had been other recent zombie works including 28 DAYS LATER and Zack Snyder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, but my love of zombies was really more of a love of George Romero movies. There had not been one of those since BRUISER in 2000, there had not been a good one since THE DARK HALF in 1993, he had not been involved in a zombie one since the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake in 1990, and hadn’t directed one since DAY OF THE DEAD in 1985. Twenty years. And now it’s been twenty years since that.
I really liked LAND OF THE DEAD at the time, and for a while after. But when I last watched it in 2017, having bought the Scream Factory special edition, I wasn’t as into it. I was hoping that would change this time, but I’m sorry to report that LAND OF THE DEAD just doesn’t do as much for me these days. And that’s a shame because it has plenty of cool ideas, and its central theme of the powerful living in luxury locked safely away from most of the world (including the people who actually do all the work they got rich off of) is somehow even more relevant now than it was then. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Asia Argento, Bruce McFee, Dennis Hopper, Eugene Clark, Gene Mack, George Romero, Greg Nicotero, John Leguizamo, Krista Bridges, Pedro Miguel Arce, Phil Fondacaro, Robert Joy, Shawn Roberts, Simon Baker, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 20 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2025
June 24, 2005
If you’re like me you knew there was a Bewitched movie, but you didn’t know it used a weird meta premise. It turns out that yes, it’s a fantastical romantic comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a pretty blonde witch trying to live among the normies without cheating too much by using her magic, and Will Ferrell as the non-witch she falls in love with. But they don’t exactly play Samantha and Darren, the characters from the sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972 but that I did in fact watch sometimes as a kid, on Nick at Nite or something. They play the people starring as Samantha and Darren in a 2005 revival of the show.
So I started the movie thinking that director Nora Ephron (writing with her sister Delia, who also wrote THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) just thought it would be cute to have Nicole Kidman do that nose-wiggle thing Samantha does when she casts a spell, but pretty soon I was thinking no, they just liked the logo and the theme song, and needed an excuse to keep using them throughout. They’re also able to show a bunch of clips from the original show, show a gift basket full of its merchandise, animate the expressions on an officially licensed Samantha Barbie doll, and remake the animated credit sequence with Will Ferrell’s likeness. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a TV show, Carole Shelley, Delia Ephron, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth, Michael Caine, Nicole Kidman, Nora Ephron, Shirley MacLaine, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 7 Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2025
June 22, 2005
HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is the sixth motion picture in Walt Disney’s Herbie i.p. franchise saga (following THE LOVE BUG [1968], HERBIE RIDES AGAIN [1974], HERBIE GOES TO MONTE CARLO [1977], HERBIE GOES BANANAS [1980] and DISNEY’S THE LOVE BUG [1997]). It’s a sequel, not a reboot like BATMAN BEGINS, because the opening credits feature clips from some of those movies as backstory.
The story proper starts like a normal Herbie movie, with the lovable anthropomorphic (but not talking) Volkswagen Beetle with the #53 on his side causing trouble at the junkyard he’s been dumped off in. When Ray Peyton Sr. (Michael Keaton, FIRST DAUGHTER), leader of the Bass Pro Shop NASCAR team brings his daughter Maggie (Lindsay Lohan a year after MEAN GIRLS) there to buy a fixer-upper as a college graduation gift she ends up owning and restoring Herbie (due to wacky Herbie mischief). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Gough, Angela Robinson, Breckin Meyer, Cheryl Hines, Jimmi Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Mark Perez, Matt Dillon, Michael Keaton, Miles Millar, NASCAR, Robert Ben Garant, Scoot McNairy, street racing, Thomas Lennon
Posted in Reviews, Family, Sport | 7 Comments »
