Films featuring
Owen Wilson

The Darjeeling Limited

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★★★★★[/types]]

Wes Anderson films are not set in the same world in which you and I live. If they were, every member of The Royal Tanenbaums would have been strangled by someone close to them. Even if the three brothers travelling by the Darjeeling Limited do not try our patience to the same degree, it is still hard to imagine them occupying the same physical universe as the rest of us. That is either a testament to the writer/director’s imagination or a damning statement about his grip on reality. For the moment, I will give Anderson the benefit of the doubt and endorse the former view.

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Night at the Museum

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★★★★★[/types]]

Mixing comedy with elaborate special effects is a tricky balancing act. Humor requires at least the illusion of spontaneity while the effects have to be planned out to the last second. Sometimes it works just right and you get a movie like Ghostbusters, while other times you end up with a mess like Spielberg’s 1941. Night at the Museum falls somewhere between. It manages to amuse without possessing anything resembling originality.

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Cars

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★★★★★[/types]]

So how does Pixar keep hitting these animated features out of the park? The Shrek franchise may have had warning track power and the original Ice Age was a sharp single up the middle, but Pixar keeps smacking them into the stratosphere like Barry Bonds in a ‘roid rage. And why I am using so many baseball metaphors for a racing movie?

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Wedding Crashers

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★★★★★[/types]]

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This is one of those unfortunate comedies where the concept is actually funnier than the execution. It’s a shame, too, given the cast they had at their disposal. I’m sure the pitch sessions for this movie were a riot. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson crashing weddings to pick up women? Christopher Walken as the Secretary of the Treasury? Hilarity must inevitably ensue, right?

Unfortunately, no. Continue reading →

The Haunting

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★★★★★[/types]]

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Rule #1 in telling a good ghost story: the less you show of the ghost, the better. Robert Wise understood that in 1963, Jan de Bont ignores it in 1999.

For the first half of this new adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, the story follows the book and the original movie with reasonable fidelity, and thus for the first hour, The Haunting is reasonably effective and spooky. The ghostly manifestations are done with sound and suggestion, not ham-handed visuals. After that, however, the special effects take over and the film loses all narrative cohesion.

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The Royal Tenenbaums

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★★★★★[/types]]

The Royal Tenebaums is a masterfully-executed, unconventional little film starring some of our best actors, all at the top of their game, all playing characters I wanted to strangle by the middle of the picture. It’s an odd feeling to so thoroughly admire the craft with which a film was made, while still hoping for a Roland Emmerich-sized catastrophe to obliterate the city in which these characters live.

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