Category Archives: Movie Reviews

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Wrong is Right

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Wrong is Right bills itself as comedy, but it works better as a mediocre spy thriller with occasional bursts of humor. It largely fails as a comedy because, for the most part, it’s often hard to tell at what they were aiming their humor. As political satire, it’s too broad and too tame to be effective.

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Schindler’s List

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I first saw Schindler’s List in the theater a few months into its initial run and just days before its sweep at the Oscars. When it was over, I witnessed something I’d not seen much in years of movie going. As the credits rolled and the lights came up, the audience filed out in an almost reverent silence, like mourners leaving a state funeral. Clearly, the film had the same impact on everyone else in the theater that it had on me.

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Grizzly Man

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There is a certain type of mental illness, the primary symptom being a tendency, almost childlike in its innocence of the harsh realities of nature, to identify animals with human values and emotions. At its most benign stage, the victim might find himself living among a flock of parrots in San Francisco. However, as the affliction grows more acute and starts to attack the reasoning centers of the brain, the unfortunate person joins groups like PETA. When all higher brain functions are destroyed, the victim will gravitate to terrorist groups like the Animal Liberation Front. When this disease reaches its terminal stage, the afflicted gets eaten by a bear.

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Runaway Jury

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Be forewarned, while I normally avoid giving out plot spoilers in my reviews, I feel like it’s necessary this time to fully get my opinion across.

Runaway Jury is probably one of the more morally bankrupt mainstream movies I’ve seen. It stacks the deck completely in favor of one side in order to justify the deplorable actions of the film’s hero, which amount to no less than subverting the justice system to suit his own agenda. The fact that he is, in effect, giving the film’s villain a taste of his own medicine is completely irrelevant when our protagonist is also sinking to the same level or lower.

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Dark Water

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In most of the places that I’ve lived, a water-stain on the ceiling is not scary. Annoying, yes; disgusting, absolutely, but I’ve never had the feeling that it was trying to kill me.

It was in that mindset that I first saw the previews to Dark Water. My initial instinct was quite cynical. Ooooh, dirty water! That’s so scaaary!

Okay, so I was wrong, which is, by itself, not exactly a newsworthy event. Dark Water is an effective, if predictable, supernatural thriller. Continue reading

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

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After being tripped up by their own mistake of letting William Shatner direct a Star Trek feature, the powers-that-be at Paramount did the only wise thing: They brought back Nicholas Meyer, director of installment number two, The Wrath of Khan, still the gold standard among the ten Star Trek movies.

While this sixth movie doesn’t rise to the same level of Khan, it comfortably leaps into second place among the Trek feature films. Continue reading

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

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This movie may be just a little bit of the curse of my generation. I have many memories from approximately five, six years ago, sitting in a conference call at my job. I worked for Gateway Computers at the time and the rest of my team was in South Dakota, poor bastards. Anyway, on these conference calls, any and every awkward silence would be greeted with someone parodying Ben Stein‘s economics teacher. “Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?”

Along with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller has become sort of an “official” movie for people who went to high school during the eighties. It is, quite simply, the perfect high school fantasy where the clever adolescent ditches school and puts one over on the entire adult world.

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Lost in La Mancha

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Had everything gone according to plan in August of 2000, the film that became Lost in La Mancha would have been an extra on the DVD edition of a new Terry Gilliam film called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. Instead, this film shows an often bizarre sequence of events that explains why there was never any such film.

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The Constant Gardener

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When a film goes out of its way to portray an entire industry as the epitome of rapacious evil, barely two steps above drowning orphans in a river, you have to at least speculate that the filmmakers might be stacking the deck a little in favor of one side of the argument. Fortunately, The Constant Gardener works quite well on the level of a pure thriller, so you can accept for two hours that its heroes need their corrupt pharmaceutical companies like Luke Skywalker needed Darth Vader.

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