Reviews Worth Reading
Films released between 2000-2009
If this was the first time anyone had heard of Watchmen, they likely would be bedazzled by the techno-pornography but little else. As a companion to a book well-read, the Watchmen film is an accomplishment worthy of the director’s talents (and his faults – its airy manliness may be the only main attraction).
Eighteen minutes and thirty-four seconds in, “The Departed” splashes up on the screen to hard Irish rock and you know someone’s probably going to survive this movie, to refer to those who won’t as the dearly dead.
Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka. Depp’s oddball Michael Jackson impersonation never achieves the same eerie uncertainty, an odd discovery given that the new version seems to pride itself in replacing musical camp with veiled horror.
Finding Nemo has a brilliant way of keeping this theme in the shallows of its action, always present but rarely addressed directly in the ecosystem of all its wonderful ocean stuff.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? isn’t an enduring testament to the road picture. It doesn’t enhance your memory of them. Quite oppositely, it’s the best of them, and no better than them.
With the suspense of the chase blown, Spielberg sets up a dramatic con without the pretense that you’re wondering what will happen in a story adapted from a real and well-known memoir based on true events. He punks us with its trueness.
Harry possesses none of the fairytale virtues: no great strength or speed or cunning. When they were handing out panaceas, the poor kid must have been grounded. His destiny follows him, as other people make it. (“She knows more about you than you do,” Ron says.” Harry’s reply is from someone losing to his identity crisis: “Who doesn’t?”).
The film blasts an affectionate symphony of action spy movie set pieces, which Bird composes with such a self-believing style that he reminds me less of a director than of a virtuoso performer. And even they become a back-drop to what is essentially a mid-life crisis film, about a man who misses himself so much that he doesn’t even notice he has a family. Bird offers a genre fattened on mythic pretension a trimming alternative of joyous energy and dazzling characters.
Fukasaku proves to be a master of the micro-story, the combinations of tiny joys and creeping terrors into one huge, fleeting, emotional whole. After decades of cultural regression, he evokes Japanese cinema’s desperate, horrific roar. It has a primal beauty, of the kind that will always be repressed, misunderstood.
Corpse Bride has 77 minutes to dazzle with its artistry, yet it wastes its time with misinformation stories, a plot twist telegraphed so obviously it physically hurts, and generally inessential and confusing background noise.