Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
I haven’t seen the new one yet. Instead, a 2000 Film.com review of the second installment. The rap on the first Mission: Impossible movie was that nobody could understand the plot. Still, the picture was a worldwide blockbuster, so the problems of lucidity couldn’t have been that troubling, right? At least that’s the attitude seemingly [...]
More near-misses lately in the world of asteroids and their relationship to Earth, prompting a visit to a Film.com review of the non-Armageddon from 1998. As it turned out, I was wrong about Armageddon not being just as much a soap opera as Deep Impact; read about the grisly results here. And MSNBC is still [...]
Anglo-Irish literary subjects are on my mind at the moment, and Oscar Wilde died on Nov. 30, 1900, and that’s about it justifying a look at a 1998 Film.com review of a rather disappointingly normal movie. One of the elements of Wilde, the film bio of the great Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde, is the suggestion that [...]
We just passed the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which will serve as pretext for re-printing a 2000 Film.com review of a movie I found particularly annoying. I think I’ll stick with The Missiles of October. That 1974 TV production (shot on video, if memory serves), starring William Devane as John F. [...]
A Film.com review from 2001, this time hitting the nadir. In the old days of stupid teen sex comedies, a certain amount of gratuitous female nudity was implicit in the purchase price of the ticket. One could expect a Peeping Tom scene involving the girls’ shower, for instance, or a never-to-be-seen-again starlet doffing her bikini [...]
At least one more Film.com review from 2001, this one a particularly flaccid remake. Pat O’Connor’s directorial output has been sufficiently uneven (Cal on the plus side, Inventing the Abbotts on the other) that it is credible he could turn out something as monumentally silly as Sweet November. I, for one, find it hard to [...]
We continue trolling for Film.com reviews from 2001. Incredibly, this is not the low point. I remember seeing the trailer for this film with a preview audience full of Tom Green’s demographic, and the forceful laughter they supplied to the jokes in the trailer had a kind of defiant quality, like “This is our guy, you [...]
And another Film.com review from 2001. This movie is one of those unheralded little Aussie pictures (Love Serenade is another) that provide a large amount of feel-good. The Dish comes to us from the Australian filmmaking group that made The Castle, a splendidly silly film (and a huge hit down under). They’ve come a long [...]
I’m reprinting a few Film.com reviews from 2001. And besides, one had to address the unending demand for more material on Town & Country. When Charlton Heston is the funniest thing in a comedy, you’ve got problems. Such is the case with Town & Country, the star-crossed film that strands a group of talented people [...]
For a variety of reasons, the next few weeks in the Cornfield will be devoted to “Ten Years Gone”: movies released in 2001. This is my Film.com review of an under-appreciated gem. Gillian Anderson’s performance as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is weirdly un-modern—the actress seems to have tapped directly into the mindset [...]
Do the French make jokes about “French movies?” Roll their eyes at yet another film about young people chatting their way through a procession of cafés and love affairs? I hope not, because there are those of us who pray the “French movie” will never wane, that the garrulous spirit of Masculin-Feminin and The Mother [...]
From Film.com, first published in 1998. Saving Private Ryan has “masterpiece” written all over it: it sprawls to nearly three hours in length, it is properly measured and somber, it takes on a mighty subject. This is Steven Spielberg in Schindler mode. Private Ryan cannot merely be another war movie, or indeed just another movie. [...]
CinemaScope was de rigueur at Fox at this moment (1955), so here is Samuel Fuller going widescreen for a bright-lit color-filled noir shot in Japan. Like Hell and High Water just before it, it feels as though Fuller is not yet happy about ‘Scope, and unless you have a giant TV it looks very tableau-heavy, with small [...]
Welcome 2011 with one last look back at the best releases of 2010, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Sean Axmaker 1. Carlos 2. Let Me In 3. The Social Network 4. White Material 5. Winter’s Bone 6. The Ghost Writer 7. Wild Grass 8. Eccentricities Of A Blond Haired Girl 9. Sweetgrass [...]
This was written in 1990 for a film series called “Myth of the West” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. As a program note, it’s a brief introduction to Ride the High Country; its references to Peckinpah beginning to fade from film history are even keener now that it’s been over a quarter-century since [...]