“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
It’s easy to see how Sin City earned its R rating. It’s a hell of a film—dark, violent, graphic, so hard-boiled it could crack concrete. It’s also one of the most visually accomplished comic-book adaptations ever made.
Finding Neverland is a nice film about a nice little man who befriends a nice young widow and her nice family, and uses their relationship as the basis for a nice play that ends up succeeding, well, nicely. In fact, Finding Neverland is such a thoroughly nice film, saying anything not nice about it would only make me seem like one of those curmudgeonly critics who hates everything.
Take the 1995 hit Jumanji, launch it into outer space, and you’ve got Zathura. Well, almost.
Stephen Sommers, the writer-director who inflicted The Mummy Returns on us in 2001, has evidently decided that hacking a single classic monster movie to pieces isn’t enough. In Van Helsing, Sommers offers up an “homage” to all three of Universal’s canonical creature features: Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man. The result is like Frankenstein’s monster in a china shop.
Have you ever seen a movie, and forgotten that you’ve seen it within hours of leaving the theatre? That’s what happened to me after seeing The Forgotten. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie (although I’m not saying it’s a particularly good one, either); I’m just saying that there isn’t much memorable about it. It’s like a name you forget moments after hearing it, or a phone number you constantly have to re-check. It just won’t stick in your mind.
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.
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.
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.