Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Thursday, July 11th, 2024
July 6th, 1994
We associate the summer movie season with a certain type of blockbuster. There have been many years where the biggest movie was about a Batman, a Spider-Man, a Terminator, some dinosaurs, some Jedis. 1994 had a different approach – the real behemoth was a cutesy romp through 20th century American history, a bit of a comedy, a bit of a weepy. FORREST GUMP was the year’s highest grossing movie at the domestic box office (#2 to THE LION KING worldwide), its soundtrack album reached #2 on the Billboard album charts (also below THE LION KING) and went twelve times platinum. The movie won Oscars for best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay, visual effects and editing, and it even inspired a chain of seafood restaurants. So fuck THE LION KING.
It’s funny, I remember going to see this movie right when it came out, not expecting any of that. I was going as a fan of Robert Zemeckis’ obsession with pushing technology forward. I had read about the scenes where Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump is made to appear in footage with John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford and other real people. It was a new technological feat at the time and this was the guy who had combined animation with live action so well in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and made a digital hole through Goldie Hawn in DEATH BECOMES HER. Remember how that seemed like the coolest thing ever? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Eric Roth, Gary Sinise, Haley Joel Osment, Mykelti Williamson, Robert Zemeckis, Robin Wright, Sally Field, Tom Hanks, Winston Groom
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama | 40 Comments »
Wednesday, July 10th, 2024
BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F is a perfectly entertaining, perfectly obvious long-awaited nostalgia sequel, perfect for streaming once and forgetting. Eddie Murphy (DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) returns to play Detroit police detective Axel Foley 40 years after the original and 30 years after the disappointment of BEVERLY HILLS COP III. He still has the same job, same basic outfit, the soundtrack repeats “The Heat Is On,” “Neutron Dance” and part II’s “Shakedown,” and the score by Lorne Balfe (TERMINATOR GENISYS, BAD BOYS FOR LIFE, TOP GUN: MAVERICK) reworks Harold Faltermeyer’s beloved “Axel F Theme” and mimics some of his 1984 synth sounds.
So this is not a “He’s having to face age and change!” sequel like ROCKY BALBOA or a “He’s passing the torch” one like CREED. Instead it’s a “He’s still here, not much has changed!” His boss in Detroit was killed in part III, but his old partner Jeffrey Friedman (Paul Reiser, WHIPLASH) is the chief now. Jeffrey tries to convince Axel to visit Beverly Hills not for a case, but to reconnect with his grown up, estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige, ZOLA). He moved her to Beverly Hills when she was young and then divorced her mother, they have not spoken in years but somehow she’s family to his 90210 cop friends Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold, GREMLINS) and Taggart (John Ashton, HIDDEN ASSASSIN). Billy was pushed off the force and became a private detective (but still loves Rambo), Taggart is the chief now. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bronson Pinchot, Eddie Murphy, John Ashton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Judge Reinhold, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Etten, Lorne Balfe, Luis Guzman, Mark Malloy, Mark Pellegrino, Paul Reiser, Taylour Paige, Tom Gormican, Will Beall
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 28 Comments »
Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
July 1st, 1994
THE SHADOW is another weird 1994 would-be blockbuster that I previously wrote about in my 2017 series Summer Flings, and I will point you to that review for a more thorough accounting of its plot, merchandising and promotion. But it’s a movie I’m pretty fond of and it’s at least trying to be one of the more traditional popcorn movies of the summer so I wanted to revisit it and discuss it in the context of this retrospective.
You know, when I look at it now the math kinda makes sense. Old pulp super hero + the period when studios were trying to recreate the magic of BATMAN 1989 + Russell Mulcahy, the pioneering music video director who gave us HIGHLANDER and HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING = this movie. It has all kinds of the old timey concepts and tone that I enjoy, it’s filmed with enthusiastic style and energy, it also has a bit of a craziness that’s appealing to me but maybe a turn off for the kind of wide audience they were obviously hoping for. It’s not as wild or messy as THE QUICKENING but it has enough of that that it’s not surprising it didn’t catch on. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Leong, Alec Baldwin, Andre Gregory, David Koepp, Ian McKellen, John Lone, Jonathan Winters, Max Wright, old timey super heroes, Penelope Ann Miller, Peter Boyle, Russell Mulcahy, Tim Curry
Posted in Reviews, Comic strips/Super heroes | 49 Comments »
Monday, July 8th, 2024
I hope everybody had a good Big Mia Weekend this year! For me, MAXXXINE was easily the most anticipated non-FURIOSA movie event of the summer.
In case you haven’t met Maxine Minx, she’s a character from Ti West’s X (2022). That’s a slasher movie set in 1979, when a group of amateur pornographers rent a farmhouse to shoot their first movie and are terrorized by the octogenarian owners (and an alligator). Mia Goth (A CURE FOR WELLNESS) plays both Maxine, the star of the porno shoot, and Pearl, the withered psychopath she runs over at the end. The prequel PEARL (shot back-to-back and released in the same year) is set in 1918, with Goth playing young Pearl growing up and losing her shit in the same farmhouse.
Now MAXXXINE completes the trilogy with Goth playing Maxine in 1985. Since surviving the massacre she’s had a successful porn career in Los Angeles and is now trying to move into “real” movies, like Marilyn Chambers or Traci Lords. But just when she seems to have her big break a sleazy private detective named John Labat (Kevin Bacon, FRIDAY THE 13TH, WILD THINGS) starts to harass her about her past, and also someone starts killing her friends and co-workers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Bobby Cannavale, Elizabeth Debicki, Giancarlo Esposito, Halsey, Kevin Bacon, Larry Fessenden, Mia Goth, Michelle Monaghan, Moses Sumney, Simon Prast, Ti West, Toby Huss, Tyler Bates, Zachary Mooren
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Horror | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024
July 1, 1994
BABY’S DAY OUT was a financial flop panned by critics, and from what I remember kind of a breaking point where for a while John Hughes became thought of more as the kids-movies-about-testicle-smashing guy instead of the beloved-‘80s-teen-coming-of-age movie guy. I don’t really have a strong opinion about his work but I found this one for the most part unfunny and annoying. I’ll try not to be too mean about it.
Hughes is the writer/producer, but the director is Patrick Read Johnson, who was a miniature model maker on 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT, BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and WARLOCK, second unit director of DEAD HEAT, and writer/director of SPACED INVADERS. It makes sense that this would come from someone with that background, because it’s a big live action cartoon with FX by ILM, including one of the first c.g. three-dimensional cityscapes and whatever tricks are involved in making it look like an actual baby is crawling around a city being lifted around by cranes, barely avoiding getting run over, etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Levine, Brian Haley, Bruce Broughton, Cynthia Nixon, Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano, John Hughes, John Neville, Lara Flynn Boyle, Matthew Glave, Patrick Read Johnson, Verne Troyer
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024
June 29, 1994
I LOVE TROUBLE is a romantic comedy mystery thriller about two reporters at rival Chicago newspapers competing to get the scoop about a series of deaths of people connected to a particular project at a chemical company. Peter Brackett (Nick Nolte, 48 HRS.) is a womanizing columnist so famous and “off the charts hot” that he’s in Gap ads and constantly recognized in public. We meet him when he’s dropped off at work by a very satisfied groupie he picked up at a signing for his new novel White Lies. Meanwhile, Sabrina Peterson (Julia Roberts, THE PLAYER) is new in town, introduced into the movie pumps and legs first, noticed for her looks but quickly establishes herself to the point of having a full-sized photo on the side of a delivery truck that crosses paths with the one that has Peter’s photo on it. I wondered if somebody saw the introduction to Siskel & Ebert and thought, “Hmmm. What if one was a lady, and they fell in love? And solved a mystery?”
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Bernardi, Charles Martin Smith, Charles Shyer, Clark Gregg, David Newman, Eric Poppick, Frankie Faison, James Rebhorn, Jane Adams, Julia Roberts, Keith Gordon, Nancy Meyers, Nick Nolte, Nora Dunn, Olympia Dukakis, Paul Gleason, Paul Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Saul Rubinek, Walter Murch
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Mystery | 22 Comments »
Monday, July 1st, 2024
June 25, 1994
The day after WYATT EARP came out, HBO debuted a western of their own. BLIND JUSTICE stars Armand Assante (PARADISE ALLEY) as Canaan, a blind gunfighter who wears goggle-like sunglasses, enjoys cigars, and is introduced carrying a baby. When he’s surrounded by bandits he hands the baby to one of them and shoots the others. It made me think this was gonna be a western riff on ZATOICHI + LONE WOLF AND CUB, which sounds like a fun time to me, so I thought oh no, I’m gonna seem like a real heathen if I’m more enthusiastic about the cheap ass made-for-cable western of summer ’94 than the expensive theatrical ones by Richard Donner and Lawrence Kasdan. But I had nothing to worry about.
The baby isn’t his, and is too young to participate in the violence, as good ol’ Daigoro does in LONE WOLF AND CUB. This one’s an infant girl he doesn’t even know the name of because “the poor man” he took her from died before he could tell him her name. “It was a shame I had to kill him,” he says. But he promised to bring her to her mother in some town called Los Portales that no one has ever heard of. In his search he ends up in San Pedro, a border town where cavalry men are holed up, protecting a shipment of silver for the mint, unable to leave because the only road through the canyon is blocked by the sadistic bandit Alacran (Robert Davi, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY) and his men. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Baldwin, Armand Assante, Daniel Knauf, Danny Nucci, David Heyman, Elisabeth Shue, Ian McElhinney, Jack Black, Jimmy Herman, made-for-cable-movies, Neal H. Moritz, Richard Spence, Robert Davi
Posted in Reviews, Western | 7 Comments »
Friday, June 28th, 2024
June 24, 1994
It always seems to surprise people when I admit stuff like this, but until now I had never seen WYATT EARP. And when I was getting ready to watch it and do this review I worried I was gonna get myself into trouble because it came out six months after TOMBSTONE, and lived and died in its comparisons to TOMBSTONE, so I know everyone in the comments is gonna want to talk about that. And the thing is I still haven’t seen TOMBSTONE either. Yeah, I know. I’ll get around to it.
Initially I thought I should do that first, but then I realized it was a unique opportunity to be the one guy watching WYATT EARP on its 30th anniversary with zero instinct to compare and contrast to TOMBSTONE. I have been preparing three decades to be this specific guy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Baldwin, Annabeth Gish, Betty Buckley, Bill Pullman, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Gordon, David Andrews, Dennis Quaid, Doc Holliday, Gene Hackman, Ian Bohen, James Newton Howard, Jeff Fahey, Jim Caviezel, Joanna Going, Jobeth Williams, John Doe, Kevin Costner, Lawrence Kasdan, Lewis Smith, Linden Ashby, Mackenzie Astin, Mare Winningham, Mark Harmon, Martin Kove, Michael Madsen, Tea Leoni, Tom Sizemore, Wyatt Earp
Posted in Reviews, Western | 26 Comments »
Wednesday, June 26th, 2024
THE BIKERIDERS is writer/director Jeff Nichols’ (TAKE SHELTER, MUD, LOVING) version of a biker gang movie. It’s loosely adapted from a 1968 book by Danny Lyon, who spent several years riding with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago. Nichols incorporated Lyon as a character (played by Mike Faist of WEST SIDE STORY and CHALLENGERS) who’s spending time with the fictional Vandals motorcycle club, taking photos and recording interviews, and if you step back you can picture a version where he’s the lead. We would learn about this world along with him and then it would sort of become his story as he deals with the macho insecurities raised by trying to fit in with these guys. Eventually he realizes it’s bringing out a dark side of him but in the end he learns about himself or some shit. You know the drill. Like a sleeveless version of Matthew Rhys’ character in A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Austin Butler, Beau Knapp, Boyd Holbrook, Damon Herriman, Danny Lyon, Emory Cohen, Happy Anderson, Jeff Nichols, Jodie Comer, Karl Glusman, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, motorcycles, New Journalism, Norman Reedus, Toby Wallace, Tom Hardy, Will Oldham
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama | 14 Comments »
Monday, June 24th, 2024
June 24, 1994
There’s this term they got now, “Disney adult.” I’d rather jump in a pool of lava than be called that. I feel that it goes without saying that animation is an artform, that Disney is a historically great animation studio, and that adults can appreciate their films if they want to, so turning it into an identity group is not necessary. I’m not a person who would strut around in a Winnie the Pooh letterman’s jacket like I think I’m Ryan Gosling in DRIVE, I’m just an ordinary respecter of excellence in animation.
Most of my favorites are ones from before I was born, like PINOCCHIO, but I also respect the now-vaunted “renaissance” period of the ‘90s and enjoyed most of them in theaters. I was in my teens or twenties then, so I was never indoctrinated by the clamshell VHS tapes, and maybe my tastes are just weird. I used to rate BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN at the top but to me their greatness has faded a little with time, so I’m afraid I have THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER, POCAHONTAS and TARZAN at the top. I know millennials love MULAN and I wish I did too, it seems like the subject matter I’d like best, I just think the animation and story are mediocre by their standards.
And, even worse, I never liked THE LION KING (as I confessed when I reviewed its widely derided, $1.664 billion box office grossing 2019 remake). I’ve watched the original several times over its decades of existence, always thinking this is gonna be the time it works for me. Never does. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Disney, Elton John, Hans Zimmer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jeremy Irons, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, talking animals, Tim Rice
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit | 26 Comments »
