Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie! Is there anything else people needed to know about this movie to make The Tourist a success? Actually, yes, and while it was reasonably enjoyable to see two of the brightest stars in Hollywood finally share the screen, it turns out that the film has garnered lots of bad – and perhaps unjustified – reviews. Rotten Tomatoes, for example, shows an aggregate score of 20%, making it the most disliked…Read More
Review: Inception
Inception is one of the most complicated stories I have ever seen on the big screen, but if you can figure out what’s going on, it’s an amazing movie filled with mind-boggling visuals and an intriguing exploration of how our minds work and the subconscious. It might also be the best movie of the summer, if not 2010. The story takes place in a near future where companies send agents to steal secrets from within…Read More
Review: Law Abiding Citizen
It’s not hard to find someone with a cynical view of lawyers, especially trial lawyers, many of whom are more interested in their own careers and in winning cases than they are in seeing that justice is served. It’s an old story that’s been told again and again in the cinema. Law Abiding Citizen is the latest in the bad lawyer genre, with Jamie Foxx as career focused attorney Nick Rice who accepts a plea bargain…Read More
Review: Inglourious Basterds
It’s wonderful to watch a talented professional mature in their skills and with the release of Inglourious Basterds that’s what’s clearly happened with wunderkind director and film biz bad boy Quentin Tarantino. His earlier works are best typified by Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, interesting stories that are so extraordinarily violent that the graphic violence appears in lieu of story or character development. Let me put this another way: Inglorious Basterds is the first Tarantino…Read More
Review: Rear Window
There are many films that have been written about Hollywood, but none have done a better job of exploring the relationship between the film viewer and the film than the absolutely brilliant 1954 Rear Window. The story has James Stewart (playing L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies) as a photo-journalist with his entire left leg in a cast, toe to hip, stuck for two months in his Greenwich Village apartment during a hot summer. Day by day he sits,…Read More
Review: Terminator Salvation
I’ve written before about the Curse of the Sequel, and when you’re doing a fourth installment of what we modern film people call a “franchise”, it’s doubly difficult to have a film that’s interesting, engaging, and consistent with the mythos of the earlier movies. It can be done: the new Star Trek movie is an example of a great addition to a huge franchise. It can also be messed up, as was the case in…Read More