Can you let me off at the next corner, please?
Wanted is the ultimate vacation movie, meaning that first your brain takes a vacation, followed by the laws of physics. Finally everything resembling logic just sort of buggers off and joins them on holiday. It’s bloody, sexy, brutish, noisy fun.
Yeah, that’s right. I said fun. As pleasures go, this one is guiltier than O.J.
You start down this path, where does it end?
It was probably inevitable, but a faint hint of repetition has crept into the Jason Bourne franchise. This third movie feels an awful lot like the second, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. There is enough energy to what’s happening on screen that you don’t notice the similarity between the two films.
Of course, film franchises thrive on a bit of familiarity but we can at least hope that they have the sense to stop long before they have to use ever-increasing numbers of stunt persons to double a geriatric Matt Damon.
It’s not a mistake. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t do random.
Given his initials, it’s probably not a stretch to think that Robert Ludlum was inviting comparisons between his character Jason Bourne and Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Not being a huge reader of Ludlum’s novels, I’m not able to comment on the literary character, but as played by Matt Damon, Jason Bourne exists as almost a complete antithesis to the cinematic character of Bond.
Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.
This story of a lonely man isolated from the millions of people around him could have been told in any city but Martin Scorcese’s movie could only have been made in New York City, and only in the city of the mid-seventies. Travis Bickle is as much a product of that time and place as he is a creation of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s imagination.
The New York City of Taxi Driver is definitely not today’s “Disney-fied” city. This is the pre-Giuliani Big Apple, the domain of pimps and drug dealers. (more…)
Now that Dr. King is gone, no one left but Bobby.
Perhaps a better title for this movie would The Martyrdom of Saint Robert. This movie spends most of its two hours genuflecting before the memory of JFK’s little brother. While it’s not hard to believe that Bobby Kennedy was the most interesting person at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the California primary, this movie would have you believe that the Senator was the only interesting person present that night.
Blessed me? God’s been a real sport to me!
I don’t know why, but over the years, the best films based on the works of Stephen King have been those based on material that didn’t fit into the stereotypical mold of the horror-meister, like Stand by Me, Misery and David Cronenerg’s adaptation of The Dead Zone. The straight spook-and-slash flicks have been cranked out by hacks who lean entirely on the gooey red stuff and toss King’s characterization and texture over the side. On the other end of the spectrum was Stanley Kubrick’s arid interpretation of The Shining, where the director’s distance from the material could be measured in light-years.
Theatrical version:
Redux version:
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.
Francis Ford Coppola’s feverish anti-war epic Apocalypse Now actually began its journey to screen in the late sixties when Über-macho filmmaker John Milius attempted to meet the challenge presented to him when he was informed that no one had successfully adapted Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, although several had tried, including luminaries such as Orson Welles. His original screenplay was true to Milius’s conservative, pro-military outlook, containing a great deal of praise for the warrior lifestyle and nothing but contempt for the hippies he saw protesting against the Vietnam War.
Whatever female-based, emotion-driven dilemma you may be dealing with right now, I sympathize with you. But right now, we need to break this down into male-based, fact-driven logic.
Red Eye had the misfortune of being the film in last year’s “Hitchcockian thriller set aboard a jetliner” sweepstakes that didn’t star Jodie Foster. I haven’t seen Flightplan yet, so I can’t say which one was actually better, but that film will have to work hard to be as effective and efficient a thriller as Red Eye.
The six of us with no money and in private are gonna solve a conspiracy that the Warren Commission couldn’t solve?
Oliver Stone‘s JFK is a movie as admirable in its technique as it is troubling in its agenda. Much like Birth of a Nation sought to rewrite the early history of the original Ku Klux Klan, JFK represents a concerted effort on Stone’s part to insert certifiable falsehoods into the historical record of the Kennedy assassination. He gets two basic facts correct. John F. Kennedy was indeed assassinated on November 22, 1963 and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison did actually prosecute businessman Clay Shaw for his role in an alleged conspiracy. After that, the facts and Mr. Stone have a strained relationship at best. I sincerely hope that this movie will be as routinely dismissed by future generations as Birth of a Nation is today.
It’s a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.
The Manchurian Candidate has always been in a class by itself among cold war political thrillers. Maybe it was just the mystique that came with being unavailable for so many years, but maybe it was the simply fact that this is a damn good movie. Smart and laced with liberal doses of McCarthy-era satire, The Manchurian Candidate still stands as the pinnacle of John Frankenheimer‘s directing career.
