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During its theatrical release, David Fincher’s Zodiac was at least partially marketed as some kind of slasher film from the director of Se7en. This probably accounts for its low numbers at the box office, since the slasher movie crowd is definitely not the target audience for this movie, which has more in common with All the President’s Men than it does with Fincher’s 1995 serial killer movie.
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As an action film, Shooter is made with great professionalism, using top flight actors and superb production values. None of this disguises the fact that the story is assembled out of well-used spare parts from other movies, not all of which fit together neatly. What emerges is a Frankenstein’s monster that photographs extremely well.
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Released at the height of the James Bond heyday, this sober, gritty adaptation of John le Carré’s novel
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Babel, the third and probably final collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, is a well-acted, beautifully shot film that somehow manages to hold you at arm’s length for more than two hours. It is frustrating because you do want to know these characters better but the movie never lets you get close enough.
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Dead, or alive, we all come home together. So help me, God.
In a lot of ways, this is the movie that The Green Berets should have been.
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Saving Private Ryan is almost two movies in one. The first is a short but intense 30-minute piece about the Omaha Beach landings while the second is a more traditional “unit” picture running about two-and-a-half hours. Only the presence of the same actors in both ties the two parts together. Each could probably stand separately but folded into the same film, the first part helps give the second, longer narrative layers of meaning and emotional weight that it wouldn’t otherwise carry.
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How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.
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Who would have guess that they could make a movie about gay sheepherders and people would flock to see it? Sorry, but that’s about the only Brokeback Mountain joke that I have not heard in the last eighteen months. I will admit that I went into this film with a degree of skepticism, fearing that it would be an earnest, self-conscious “message movie.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a carefully observed study of two sharply drawn individuals in a doomed relationship and how that relationship impacts their lives.
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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.
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As a standalone movie, judged apart from its lesser sequels, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a pure, unfiltered dose of joyful escapism. Rarely has the medium of film been so successfully used for the purpose of pure entertainment. Free from director Steven Spielberg’s tendency for suburban navel-gazing, cute kids and distant parents, as well as producer George Lucas’s later bloated mythic pretensions, Raiders tosses overboard every piece of narrative flab as the story hums along like a well-tuned V-8 engine.
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There has to be some degree of irony to a film called The Ten Commandments, since one of those commandments says “make no graven images,” and this film does sort of count as one long graven image. Or am I completely off base?
Either way, this is one of those completely “review-proof” films, where any attempt to analyze or criticize it as you would a normal film. For people who love this film, the basic standards of filmmaking are utterly without relevance to their enjoyment of it. Sure, by our definition of what constitutes a good movie, impresario Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epic is an overacted, overwrought potboiler, but saying so leaves you feeling like a spoilsport, if not a bloody heathen.
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Nicholas Cage seems condemned to narrate movies in which he stars, beginning with Raising Arizona. No less than two movies last year made similar use of Cage’s vocal talents, Lord of War and now The Weather Man. Why is it about Cage that causes people to cast him in this type of role so often? His voice does have a unique hang-dog quality, sort of like a kindly bloodhound character from an animated Disney movie.