I have a confession: I love McDonald’s food. When I was a kid, I constantly pestered my parents to take me there. When I was in high school, I once ate four Big Macs in one sitting. In my university days, I gave semi-serious thought to living on nothing but McDick’s and multivitamins. But after watching this film, I seriously doubt that I’ll eat at McDonald’s again. Ever.
Archive for Movie Review
When DreamWorks SKG released Shrek in 2001, it finally proved that it could stand in the same ring with Disney/Pixar, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the computer-animated film world. (In fact, Shrek narrowly out-grossed Pixar’s Monsters Inc., released the same year.) Disney/Pixar’s counterpunch came last year, when Finding Nemo became the highest-grossing animated film ever. But just when you thought DreamWorks was on the ropes, they bounce back with Shrek 2, the best animated sequel since Pixar’s Toy Story 2.
Boxing metaphors aside, Shrek 2 owes its quality to more than just a strong competitor. The humour works on at least two different levels, from the kid-friendly fart jokes to visual quotes of films as diverse as The Princess Bride, Alien and Spider-Man. The Disney/Pixar team has been extremely successful at this kind of thing (and the first Shrek was as much an imitation of that successful formula as a parody of it), but Shrek 2 takes things to a new level of sustained hilarity. Visual gags abound, and many of them are easy to miss the first time around. This is a film that will make parents actually want to drag their progeny to overcrowded multiplexes to see it again.
There’s a long-standing double standard in romantic movies. Pairing an older man with an older woman is okay; so is pairing an older man with a young woman. But never, under any circumstances, must an older woman be paired with a young man. Something’s Gotta Give, the latest trifle from light-comedy specialist Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, The Parent Trap), playfully flirts with that old convention, but in the end it’s only a tease.
As a horror movie fan, I wanted to like this film. I really did. But if you want to know what’s it’s like to be a horror movie fan, here’s an extended metaphor for you. Imagine that you have a collection of rare diamonds. Now imagine that your dog keeps getting into your diamond collection and eating some. You’re not sure when it happens, so you have to spend a lot of time doing the only thing you can—going through dog poop with painstaking care. Some days—most days—you never find anything but dog poop. But once in a while you find a diamond in there, and it’s the feeling you get from finding one that keeps you sifting through dogshit all the time.
Underworld is about vampires and werewolves, but it isn’t your average horror movie. It’s not a horror movie at all, really. It’s more like what would happen if the directors of The Matrix staged a production of Romeo and Juliet at one of those geek parties where everyone wears fangs and acts all vampire-ish.
The tag line for this film reads, “Every legend has its dark side.” And when you think about it, that’s true. Take the Tooth Fairy, for instance. On the surface, she’s just a benevolent spirit who runs a presumably respectable business trading kids’ unwanted baby teeth for cash. But exactly how does she manage to steal undetected into their bedrooms at night, and why aren’t kids supposed to peek at her? Or more creepy to ponder, exactly what does she want with all those baby teeth? Kind of casts her in a whole new light, doesn’t it?
That’s the idea behind Darkness Falls, a would-be grim fairy tale that gives the Tooth Fairy a nasty image makeover. The revised legend, narrated at the beginning, casts her as the malevolent ghost of an eccentric, burn-scarred old woman out to avenge her own wrongful lynching more than a century earlier. (It seems there was a misunderstanding about a couple of missing kids.) Having cursed the town of Darkness Falls, she now visits children on the night after they’ve lost their last baby tooth—and in the following sequence, a promisingly creepy bit of business directly descended from an earlier short by writer Joe Harris, we see what happens when a young boy named Kyle Walsh (Joshua Anderson) makes the fatal mistake of peeking.
What is The Animatrix? If you have to ask, you’re probably not ready to know yet, but here goes anyway: a made-in-Japan Heavy Metal wired into The Matrix’s mind-altered universe, The Animatrix is a series of nine animated short films designed to give the 1999 movie’s huge fan base a quick fix of their favorite red pill between heavier feature-film doses.
But unlike most straight-to-video tie-ins (like the rash of inferior “sequels” Disney has been crapping out with alarming regularity), The Animatrix isn’t merely knocked-off “further adventures” filler with cheaper productions values and low-rent voices. Spearheaded by Matrix writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski, the animated anthology boasts voice cameos by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, and artwork by some of the biggest names in Japanese anime.
If you thought a telemarketer was the worst thing that could happen when you answer the phone, this film’s high-concept premise might change your mind. Set almost entirely in and around a single New York City pay phone, Phone Booth is essentially a one-act morality play about lies and infidelity, disguised as a thriller.
Ang Lee’s Hulk is a lot like the titular green goliath and his mild-mannered scientist alter ego, Bruce Banner: it’s a wimpy psychological drama that occasionally transforms into a monstrously enjoyable summer action movie. But as was the case with the Taiwanese director’s last feature, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the psychological stuff adds a surprising (and surprisingly welcome) level of depth to the genre material.
Of course, that depth was already there for the mining. Whether in his original comic form, or as Lou Ferrigno in the now-classic TV series, the Hulk has always represented something that has universal psychological appeal. He’s the ultimate expression of repressed rage, an ultra-powerful Hyde lurking just beneath the surface of our civilized Jekyll manners, waiting for some jackass to provoke us so he can literally burst out of our clothing (except for those torn purple shorts, that is) and start smashing everything in sight.
As thrillers go, Red Dragon isn’t bad at all. It may not be in the same league as 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs—a film it tries very hard to look and feel like—but it does maintain some of the same mood of tense dread. Too bad it’s also the least essential thriller remake since Gus Van Sant’s ill-advised 1998 revision of Psycho.