Tag Archive
The Losers
There aren’t a lot of actors that I bring negative baggage to when I see them on the screen. My job is to be as objective as I can, within my own subjectivity. In general, I would try to avoid films where these actors have lead roles, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise. And early on […]
Skatetown, U.S.A.
Categorizing a movie as a time capsule reduces it to a simple evocation of a specific time and nothing else. William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is drenched in 1985, a Wang Chung score, rampant androgyny, ridiculous car chases, cheerful amorality, and a cynical fetishism that seems modeled on Miami Vice, which debuted […]
I Really Wanted to Get Smart
Wanton violence and nihilism is not always a bad thing. As with anything, it is entirely about tone. Having just finished watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, in all its studio-polished, R-rated glory – where the question of character deaths was not an “if” proposition, but rather a “when” – it became clear what […]
The Treadmill Thriller
Paycheck is one of the better examples of what I call the Treadmill Thriller, in which a character is involved, unknowingly in building/devising something world altering for the government or a shady corporation, or he witnessed the building of it, and after the 20 minute set-up of this product, he spends the next 70 minutes […]
Street Kings
“I woke up, and I was a cliché.” The fact that this isn’t the first line of dialogue in Street Kings, a new cop-thriller with Keanu Reeves, should be considered a missed opportunity. Opening with Reeves getting out of bed to a blaring alarm, fully clothed, hearing a neighborhood dog barking, loading his gun, stumbling […]
The Matrix: Reloaded
Watching The Matrix: Reloaded, one has to say that it was a good thing the movie was basically pre-sold. There is a fundamental problem with the enterprise, that I don’t think interested the Wachowski’s anyway. Since the idea behind these films is to attempt to obscure the meaning with overy complex language to give […]