Reviews Worth Reading
What was once a man’s desperate quest to resurrect his lost lover ala Dracula has been turned into a petulant girl’s desire to reincarnate the god she serves ala Suicide Squad. Could there be a more fitting beginning to this venture? This is shaping up to be a cinematic universe in the same way that a mime doing the invisible box gag is shaping up to be an opera.
When Mary Poppins pops out on stage in stockings and Mia Wallace hair I was reminded of some Mary Poppins-themed miniskirt ensembles I saw in a shop window in Disney Springs. From then on, I was half-afraid of the Banks home staging a rendition of the sexy maid porno situation. I’m fairly certain Andrews’ version would have scoffed the scanty jollity of this number in particular. I’m positive that author P.L. Travers would have wept.
Superman Returns feels like a lot of charming people were motivated to do the film twenty takes ago; now they’re kind of wistful and waiting for a break. The script has the right beats but the film is filled with sleepwalkers.
Cuarón colludes with us like one of Harry’s helpful army of British character actors whispering in our ear in a language we understand without knowing, or a clever dad with a dark and silly secret. This is the first Harry Potter film that feels like an open book. It’s the best teen film ever made.
Alien: Resurrection is not unified by its cynicism as Robocop was. It’s not a satire of us, but just a satire of Alien movies. It’s never boring and that’s actually something, in the realm of fourth entries. The reason this film is in the category of “Everyone Else is Wrong” is not because I think it’s good, but because I don’t know what people were expecting.
Director James Cameron, hot off The Terminator, warps passed Ridley Scott’s harrowing and sensitive tale of psycho-sexual terror into two hours of sadistic fun, a haunted house in space, a boo movie elevated to mythic status. No one will blame you for being exhausted. This is the Citizen Kane of bug hunts.
I have not in recent memory seen a film whose concept is more divergent from its filmmaking than The Cloverfield Paradox. It is a movie so dumbfoundingly predictable and yet so incomprehensible that it becomes meaningless even as an average film, a paradox only in the sense that its grand pretensions cannot occupy the same space as the need to connect a franchise that was never intended to be cohesive.
I’m aware that Alien 3 had a troubled development and a schizophrenic screenwriting cycle, all documented to any reasonable human’s satisfaction on Wikipedia. But if the result had been miraculous, Fincher would have reaped the credit as a directorial miracle worker. Blame is now the price of that possibility.
Superman II is exciting even in its flaws: even its badness seems to defy other kinds of movies, like so long as Superman is on top of this, everything else will be okay. It’s an uneven and delightful ride with defiant special effects — they defy the ambition of their practicality and also how that ambition has aged.
Watching the original Superman I was not filled with awe so much as a kind of quiet calm, as though a wise person had just reminded me of a well-worn truth. DC is terribly wrong. The old myths still soar.