Author: Robert Horton

Robert Horton has been a film critic in Seattle for about 30 years, yet he mysteriously retains the blush of youth. He comments on film for The Herald (Everett, Washington), KUOW-FM, the Seattle Channel and his blog The Crop Duster. He is also the curator and host of the monthly Magic Lantern series at the Frye Art Museum, a periodic contributor to Film Comment and other publications, and the author of Billy Wilder: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001) and Frankenstein (Wallflower Press, 2009); his work was also included in Best American Movie Writing 1999 (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999) and the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (St. James Press, 2000).

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: The House of Mirth

Written by Robert Horton November 9, 2020November 4, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

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 of the Edith Wharton novel, to a style predating ironic distance. Anderson maintains this even though the film’s dialogue and line readings are (rightly so) pitched in a way that heightens the artificial nature of the New York social scene, circa 1905. Anderson, whose performance often has a trapped, corseted intensity, gets Lily’s tragedy: It’s not that Lily doesn’t understand the rules of the game — it’s that she does, but she thinks her wit and beauty can skirt that calcified code.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews, Horror

2000 Eyes: Hollow Man

Written by Robert Horton October 30, 2020October 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

If Hollow Man doesn’t dive anywhere near the implications of its T.S. Eliot–inspired title, settling for the form and function of a summer movie, it nevertheless offers something extra. That extra is the edge provided by director Paul Verhoeven, the perverse Dutch master who brings his cruel, nasty personality to the party. Despite Showgirls, Verhoeven is a distinctive talent—sometimes incoherent, but often bracing.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Autumn in New York

Written by Robert Horton October 28, 2020October 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Like most movies, Autumn in New York has a way of stating its themes in dialogue, so we don’t miss the point. In one scene, hip restaurateur Richard Gere asks his best buddy why he should continue a relationship with a much younger woman with a serious illness. The buddy, played by Anthony LaPaglia, shrugs in the down-to-earth way of movie best buddies and says, “Maybe it makes a sad girl happy and a desperate guy think.”

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Me, Myself & Irene

Written by Robert Horton October 23, 2020October 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Of course the Farrelly brothers would make a split personality movie. It’s autobiographical: these filmmaking provocateurs are divided between sweet and sour, between the romance of classic screwball comedy and Mad magazine on acid.

So we get Me, Myself & Irene, a comedy about a Rhode Island cop who suffers from split personality disorder. In the gratifyingly wacky opening minutes of the film we meet Charlie (Jim Carrey), a nice guy stretched thin over thirty years of being a doormat. In a sequence that deliberately tramples taboos, Charlie melts down (in a line in a supermarket—perfect) and mutates into Hank, a belligerent jerk with no social boundaries.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Deterrence

Written by Robert Horton October 9, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

The concept is a little gem out of the B-movie sourcebook: In the year 2008, the president of the United States is waylaid in a small Colorado roadhouse by a massive snowstorm. At that exact moment, the new leader of Iraq—evidently no improvement over the previous leader of Iraq—launches an invasion force into an easily overrun Kuwait. The president, flanked by a couple of aides and a group of very frightened diners, must instantly make a decision on the greatest weapon in the strategic arsenal: nuclear attack.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Lucky Numbers

Written by Robert Horton October 5, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

The critical reaction to Sally Field’s directing debut, Beautiful, was interesting. That film — admittedly a mess — presented a self-centered, vain, cutthroat main character, a beauty contestant played by Minnie Driver. The response to the movie showed virtually no recognition that such a character might be presented as a source of satire, or be set up for eventual redemption (which, of course, she was). Instead, critics and audiences alike seemed outraged that anyone would presume to place such a lowlife at the center of a film. (We have come a long way from the anti-heroes of the 1970s, folks.)

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Pola X

Written by Robert Horton September 25, 2020September 22, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities, was widely reviled when it was published, just as Leos Carax’s film of Pierre has been generally maligned. Melville’s book came along in the wide wake of a little thing called Moby-Dick, and even if it had not, it’s a very strange novel—seemingly a put-on of a certain kind of fruity romantic tale, but stretched past the point of parody. It’s weird, but interesting-weird.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton

2000 Eyes: John Frankenheimer interview

Written by Robert Horton September 18, 2020September 8, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Herald]

One of the cool things about John Frankenheimer is that he really looks like a classic American director. Tall, and still athletic-looking at the age of 70, Frankenheimer has a white-haired, hawk-faced largeness about him. Of course, it probably helps that I am meeting him in a Seattle hotel room so big it seems positively Roman emperor scaled. The director is here to do publicity for his new thriller Reindeer Games, but I am delighted to discover him just as willing to talk about his previous films.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton

2000 Eyes: Shadow Magic

Written by Robert Horton September 14, 2020September 8, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film/com]

The lovely subject of Shadow Magic is enough to carry this somewhat awkward film over its rough spots and slow patches. The setting is Peking, around the year 1902, when Chinese culture was still fairly insulated from outside influence. We meet a photographer, Liu (Xia Yu), a very curious fellow in a society that discourages his curiosity. He plays with a Victrola, he builds himself a Zoetrope — he can’t stop fiddling around with things that have no place in his world.

Quite literally stumbling into Liu’s life comes Raymond Wallace (Jared Harris), a Westerner toting some very exotic equipment. Wallace’s scheme is to bring the newfangled technology of the Cinematograph — or motion picture, whatever you want to call it — to China. He is met with suspicion and hostility at every turn but, being a brash young man, sets up shop anyway.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton

2000 Eyes: Red Planet

Written by Robert Horton September 11, 2020September 8, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

Carrie-Anne Moss may be playing the captain of a mission to Mars, but she’s still subject to that ancient sci-fi convention: the non-essential shower scene. You’ve come a long way, baby, sort of. Actually, the shower scene in Red Planet tries to turn the tables, by having commander Moss unashamedly naked in front of the mission’s “maintenance man,” Val Kilmer, and thus dictating the sexual dynamics of the moment. But it’s still a shower scene.