At one point in this film, Ben Affleck’s character says, “Sometimes God just likes to put two guys in a paper bag and just let ‘em rip.” What he means, of course, is that sometimes writers like to put two guys in a paper bag—in this case, Ben Affleck and the always-watchable Samuel L. Jackson. On paper it has the makings of an entertaining bout of Celebrity Deathmatch, but writers Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin get muddled up trying to figure out exactly what the fighting is about.
Affleck plays a young, savvy Wall Street lawyer named Gavin Banek. Banek has everything the modern yuppie could ask for: he’s married to a senior partner’s daughter (Amanda Peet), he’s had a clandestine affair with his secretary (Toni Collette), and he’s in charge of a multimillion-dollar charity fund. Jackson plays Doyle Gipson, a separated insurance salesman, recovering alcoholic and father of two. One morning, on his way to an important hearing concerning the fund, Banek gets into a fender-bender with Gipson, who was on his way to a custody hearing for his two boys. Instead of simply swapping insurance info, Banek insists on cutting Gipson a blank cheque—and in the process accidentally leaves a vital legal document in Jackson’s possession.
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Sadly, Enough isn’t a film about the perils of celebrity overexposure. But if it were, wouldn’t the casting of Jennifer Lopez be perfect? Enough indeed. Lately, I’ve found myself muttering that very word whenever I see yet another image of J.Lo on the cover of some supermarket-newsstand magazine or hear her on the radio, writing cheques with her attitude that her thin voice can’t quite cash.
Nope, Enough is a film about a woman whose abusive husband pushes her too far and suffers the consequences. It’s a girl-power revenge fantasy, one of those trifling little Hollywood flicks that asks only that we wait around long enough to find out exactly how much crap our heroine will endure before she finally kicks the evil hubby’s cheating/stalking/threatening ass.
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The Sordid Seven
(The Worst Movies of 2002)
When it comes to bad movies, 2002 will be remembered as the Year of the Rehash. All seven of the creativity-deprived films on this list are either adaptations, remakes of older films, or sequels.
We also came very close to including another Eddie Murphy film (The Adventures of Pluto Nash) and another Adam Sandler film (the animated Eight Crazy Nights), but that would have meant ditching the rehash theme. Besides, Murphy and Sandler deserve their own separate worst-of lists.
We’d love to say it doesn’t get much worse than this, but next year would only prove us wrong.
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The Magnificent Seven
(The Best Movies of 2002)
This year proved that all movies can be created equal—or at least equally good. Our favourites include a superhero flick, a fantasy epic and a musical along with the weightier dramas that usually grab all the top spots in lists like this.
Perhaps more surprising than the films that made the cut are the ones that didn’t. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Spielberg’s Minority Report, and Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition were all highly anticipated, and all turned out to be disappointing.
But the biggest surprise of all? That would be Eminem. Even though 8 Mile didn’t make this list, Marshall Mathers showed that as both rapper and actor, he’s eight miles high above that other wigger thespian, Vanilla Ice.
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When it comes to comedy, the only thing more tiresome than a lack of wit is an overabundance of it. There’s definitely an overabundance of wit in The Importance of Being Earnest. Adapted from Oscar Wilde’s notoriously witty play by Oliver Parker (who first went Wilde with 1999′s An Ideal Husband), the film is a 19th-century laugh riot, full of the patented one-liners and cynical observations that make the play Wilde’s decadent masterpiece. If you know any of Wilde’s best epigrams, chances are they’re from Earnest. (My personal favourite: “I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”) That’s the good news. The bad news is that in this case, the lines read better than they play.
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“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”
—Sir Walter Scott
schiz·o·phre·ni·a: Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances.
—The American Heritage Dictionary
The best way to describe David Cronenberg’s latest mind-trip of a film comes from the director himself: “It has the feel of Samuel Beckett confronting Sigmund Freud.” Featuring a paranoid schizophrenic protagonist who mumbles a constant stream of unintelligible gibberish and spends much of the time literally dwelling in his past, Spider is a shoo-in for strangest movie of the year. But in terms of how it combines strangeness with sheer brilliance, it’s this year’s Mulholland Dr. It’s the kind of film that demands a few hours’ worth of post-viewing discussion over drinks with a literate friend, and gets better and better the more you think about it.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a thirtysomething singleton without a boyfriend (or at least a sport-fuck), must be in want of one.
If that sounds like Jane Austen with a vulgar modern twist, welcome to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Based on Helen Fielding’s v. v. popular novel and directed by Fielding pal and first-time director Sharon Maguire, the film is part Pride and Prejudice, part coarse email-age sex farce, and part quirky Brit-com. And for the most part, it’s funny as hell.
The first thing you’ll notice is that American actress Renée Zellweger plays the titular British singleton. The second thing you’ll notice is how little that matters. Zellweger, fleshing out her performance both figuratively (she affects a near-perfect accent) and literally (she gained over twenty pounds for the role), blends in so seamlessly with the cast of English Austen-adaptation veterans that she makes herself seem like the natural choice.
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During the late 1910s, Erich von Stroheim was known to film audiences as “The Man You Love to Hate,” thanks to a string of performances as Germanic villain stereotypes in films like The Hun Within (1918). By 1919, though, von Stroheim (who had worked briefly for D.W. Griffith) had started to write and direct the films in which he appeared. His first film, Blind Husbands, demonstrated the skillful editing and careful attention to detail that von Stroheim had learned from Griffith. It also revealed von Stroheim as a relentless perfectionist who stubbornly insisted on bringing his unique artistic vision to the screen. Along with his unsparing themes of sexual and physical degradation, this uncompromising attitude made von Stroheim the man studio executives loved to hate—and nobody hated von Stroheim more than Irving Thalberg. As a production assistant at Universal, Thalberg had fired von Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round (1922). But Thalberg’s master stroke was still to come. In 1924, when the Goldwyn Company merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form MGM, Thalberg became von Stroheim’s boss just as von Stroheim was putting the finishing touches on his fifth film, a nine-hour epic that he had carefully whittled down to a five-hour, two-part masterpiece. Thalberg took the film away from von Stroheim and handed it to editors who had read neither the script nor the novel it was based on. The release version, at just over two hours, is all that remains of von Stroheim’s vision—a series of glimpses of what might have been the greatest film ever made.
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What do you want first, the good news or the bad news? The good news is that Randall Wallace, the director of this film, wrote Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart. The bad news is that Wallace also wrote Michael Bay’s crap extravaganza, Pearl Harbor. The really bad news is that We Were Soldiers, Wallace’s look at the first important American skirmish of the Vietnam War, is a lot more like Pearl Harbor than Braveheart. Shamelessly combining violent and gory battle scenes with schmaltzy sentimentality, it’s an emotionally manipulative piece of propagandistic trash—all slick packaging and no substance.
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Maybe it’s his oft-mentioned movie-hero handsomeness, or his dignified screen presence; or maybe it’s his morally upright nice-guy image. Whatever it is, something about Denzel Washington makes him the perfect choice to play the role of good cop. And in plenty of his films—1991′s Ricochet, 1998′s Fallen and 1999′s The Bone Collector among them—he’s done just that, offering up minor variations on the same earnest, dedicated detective character. Which is why watching him play bad cop in Training Day is such a blast. Attacking the role with savage gusto, Denzel doesn’t just deconstruct his good-cop persona; he kicks it in the teeth, shoots it five times at close range and leaves it battered and bleeding on the sidewalk. Too bad the rest of the movie lets him down.
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