Mr. 3000 is the Dave of sports movies. Which is to say: It’s a good-hearted fantasy that sacrifices accuracy of detail in its chosen arena (in this case, baseball) in the interest of being emotionally resonant.
The 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead is as derivative as you’d expect and still manages to be, surprisingly, pretty damned good.
Zach Braff of TV’s Scrubs wrote, directed, and stars in Garden State, and I’m guessing people much younger than I think it is, as the kids say, “the shit.”
Aborted and brief writing on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Big Fish, and The Barbarian Invasions
The 10 greatest actors of “our” generation? (Whatever “our” means.) According to GQ, those great arbiters of cinema, it’s these boys: Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle, Russell Crowe, Benicio Del Toro, Johnny Depp, Leonardo, DiCaprio, Gael Garcia Bernal, Clive Owen, and John C. Reilly. It’s a very pretty list, Cage and Reilly excepted. (Via Salon.)
There’s nothing wrong with Ray that a little less hype couldn’t fix. As biopics go, it’s pretty good. Jamie Foxx is convincing as the iconic Ray Charles. Writer James L. White and writer/director Taylor Hackford employ a clumsily expository flashback structure that actually pays off beautifully at the end with a startling and unexpected moment of transcendence and vision. Two and a half hours clip by briskly. And there’s plenty of Charles’ music.
Birth is the perfect antidote for anybody who thinks reincarnation is a romantic notion, allowing for a reunion with the spirit of a loved one who has died. By mining the practicalities of the situation, the movie becomes a rare work that humanizes and seeks to understand the effects of reincarnation instead of merely employing it for cheap horror or cheesy romance.
My beloved Illinois men’s basketball team is very, very good, but this is ridiculous. It’s almost as bad as the anchor at ESPNEWS who asked Tuesday after Illinois won at Michigan State where the Fighting Illini rank among the greatest college-basketball teams ever. Sheesh.
A key reason Dirty Pretty Things works so well is that the audience can never be sure in what direction it will go. It might be a sober exploration of issues related to immigration, or it might be a romance, or it might be a humanistic thriller, or it might be a Lynchian mystery, or … . It’s all those things, actually, and at least pretty good at all of them. The movie is nimble, and just when you think you’ve nailed it, it swerves in another direction.
Bashing The Village, of course, is easy. But out of M. Night Shyamalan’s plodding, over-deliberate bore — neither intellectually stimulating nor marginally entertaining — could have been salvaged a good, serious, potentially wrenching exploration of the concept of the social contract.