The PR hype machine loves Eli Roth, and I ’m sure he loves it right back. His big studio directorial debut, 2002’s Cabin Fever, had the likes of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi spewing praise. The film attempted to cover every genre in the book with extremely mixed results. But… Continue reading
Ah, good old January. The holidays are over, it’s cold outside, and the holiday/Oscar cinematic rejects slog their way into theaters. Such a specimen is Grandma’s Boy, a film that would have been infinitely better off as a short subject high school project. But, the film is a product of… Continue reading
Surely you are all familiar with the “name the actor” game. It is that game people play under their breath in the theater during a movie when an actor they know shows up on screen and they feel it necessary to blurt out that name in either a loud whisper… Continue reading
I confess that I did not know what a Geisha was before seeing this film. For the uninitiated and those who have not read Arthur Golden’s novel of the same name, a Geisha is essentially a diversely talented prostitute. I say diversely talented because they are proficient dancers and well-versed… Continue reading
If we’re lucky we get one film a year that has the action, humor, heart, and colossal appeal of King Kong. The story and message are both timeless, and it’s likely that many audiences worldwide will leave the theater exclaiming that they’ve never seen anything like this before. Of all… Continue reading
Johnny Slade’s Greatest Hits is a thoroughly entertaining mob satire that is joyously campy. That’s welcome in my book since we have had some fairly rotten entries into this genre over the past few years. The story is one that could have run dry and overstayed its welcome in a… Continue reading
C.S. Lewis was ahead of his time. A hot stove topic of late has been that shortly before his death in 1963; Lewis made public his wishes that no film or TV version of his Narnia books was to be made with live actors portraying the animal characters. Well, someone… Continue reading
Halle Berry in Catwoman, Jennifer Garner in Elektra, and now Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux. They’re dropping like flies to this wild and crazy genre of female superheroes, a genre which has produced films that are so truly, god awfully bad that one can only gaze into the night sky… Continue reading
Oh, those crazy snowboarders. How vividly I remember joining the sixth grade ski club, having never worn a ski in my life, and being terrorized by their kind. They seemed bound and determined to bury me alive in snow, and I made it all the easier since the only way… Continue reading
The last thing I expected Syriana to be was an endurance test. The intriguing trailers have been floating around for several months now and my anticipation was at its peak as I headed into the screening. Low and behold, writer/director Stephen Gaghan, working from the book by Robert Baer, manages… Continue reading