Tag: Cinema

Jackie Bond.

As the second chapter of the disappointing Kill Bill comes to the screen, Quentin Tarantino suggests making a low-budget Casino Royale, with Brosnan remaining as 007. Might be interesting, and it’s really a win-win for MGM…but the Bond franchise is so poorly run that I suspect Wilson and Broccoli will let this opportunity slip.

Down for the Count.

After the comparative restraint of Eternal Sunshine, Jim Carrey gets loony again in the teaser for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I haven’t read these books, so I can’t comment on the fidelity here. It’ll take something more than this teaser to pique my interest in this project, though.

Hell Hath No Fury.

Well, I’ve only read a handful of issues of the comic over the years, but I could tell Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy looks and feels just about perfect. You can’t really ask for a better Big Red than Ron Perlman here, and John Hurt always brings class to the equation. The film’s got Rasputin, both post-dead Nazi ninjas and evil blonde Nazi temptresses (a.k.a Darth Maul and Indy 3‘s Ilsa Schneider respectively), and even heavy shades of the Cthulhu mythos. What more should a fanboy desire?

And yet, perhaps it was due to a post-orals energy slump, but I found the movie kinda slow and uninvolving. The curse of any first comic movie is the origin stuff (although in Spiderman at least, that turned out to be the best part of the film), and here I thought all of the backstory and character introductions took just a little too long. Then we have Hellboy beating up Sammael the Hellhound over and over again for an hour, followed by a rather cheesy and nonsensical third act in Russia (with heavy borrowing from the Temple of Doom this time, and particularly when Agent Myers has his rosary moment…soon Kali Ma will rule the world!) I probably enjoyed Hellboy most when it was pushing the unfathomable evils of Lovecraft angle, but tuned out slightly whenever it was time to punch out another hellhound, which, sadly, was most of the movie.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Hellboy. The acting was good all around, and, really, it’s undoubtedly going to be better than 4 out of 5 comic movies this year (Case in point: The Punisher.) Still, while I wasn’t expecting as lyrical as The Devil’s Backbone, I was expecting a popcorn film as fun as Blade II…and in that category, I thought Hellboy was somewhat wanting. Then again, it took a second go for Bryan Singer to get the X-Men popping, so perhaps Del Toro can cut to the chase in a Hellboy 2.

Forget-Me-Not.


While The Ladykillers ultimately fell well short of expectations, I thought Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lived up to the hype and then some. One part Annie Hall, one part Sliding Doors, three parts Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine is an exceptionally strange take on the romantic comedy, and probably the best flick by the screenwriter in question since Being John Malkovich. (It probably helped that I tend to be a fan of almost all the folks at work here, particularly Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah “Bad Frodo” Wood, and David Cross.) While the movie occasionally lapses into gratuitous symbolism (The “lost and gone forever” name “Clementine,” for instance) and hokey pop psychology (All of the Carrey-as-baby scenes were done more quickly and effectively in the Cameron Diaz-Catherine Keener chase scene through Malkovich’s brain), Sunshine is a fun, thought-provoking look at relationships and memory, and one that definitely holds together better than Gondy and Kaufman’s last collaboration, Human Nature.

I don’t want to say too much about Eternal Sunshine, as I think it’s probably a movie best enjoyed fresh. But just to give a sense of where my own brain was at during the film, there’s a scene near the end where Joel and Clementine are talking in a Barnes & Noble, and as they chat the books around them slowly lose their color and titles, until they’re all just blank. I think this scene unnerved me more than any other in the film…I wanted to shout, “Not until Thursday! Just remember them until Thursday!” Until then, I’d like to keep my mind as spotted as possible, thank you very much.

Lady and the Tramp.

Well, a swing-and-a-miss by the Coen brothers is still more entertaining than a lot of movies out there…nevertheless, The Ladykillers is something of a disappointment. I was amused by the film throughout, and particularly in the early minutes at the sheriff’s office, but, frankly, Ladykillers never really takes off. In fact, given how thinly conceived and surprisingly one-dimensional all of the supporting characters turn out to be, you often get the sense the brothers are slumming it. (Jokes about Irritable Bowel Syndrome? C’mon, y’all…you’re the Coens, not the Farrellys.)

Perhaps most disappointing about The Ladykillers is the realization that Tom Hanks, an actor I normally root for, hasn’t quite found his rhythm in Coenland quite yet. While I’m not quite sure how it could have come off differently, his turn as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, PhD doesn’t really work here…he’s more distracting than anything else. (I think there’s hope for Hanks, though…George Clooney seemed much more at ease in Intolerable Cruelty than he did in O Brother.) And as for the lady in question, Irma P. Hall is fun for the most part, but she too could have benefited from better material from the Coens – once the gang of thieves shows up in her root cellar, she has little to do but act affronted. A relatively amusing time at the cinema, to be sure, and particularly if you’re already sold on their sense of humor, but all in all this is a hiccup for the brothers Coen. Here’s hoping next time around is a little more satisfying.

In the Batroom.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins gets even more star-laden with the additions of Tom Wilkinson and Rutger Hauer to Gotham City. Apparently, Wilkinson’s a crime lord, while Hauer’s scheduled to attempt a hostile takeover of Wayne Enterprises. Are we going to have enough screen time for all these folks?

Tom vs. the Martians.

With Indy IV in turnaround, Steven Spielberg now plans to team up with Tom Cruise for War of the Worlds. (And, what with Robert Rodriguez’s John Carter movie, 2005 is looking to be the year of literary Martian invasion adaptations.) Anyway, hopefully Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp will stick closer to the source material than did that godawful-looking version of I, Robot.