Reviews Worth Reading
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’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.
The film is essentially about how Michael has failed to be his father, to garner real respect, and even to be truly Italian. The failure is a well-made sequel but was it necessary? It distorts the whole picture, as though Vito Corleone died for nothing.
If Raiders was a backyard adventure where we put on our explorer’s hat and went bucket-and-shoveling out into the woods for buried treasure, The Last Crusade is like watching a home movie of it. It’s still got the same gee-whizz endearment but in a “boy, don’t we look silly” kind of way.
We’re too full of wonderment to make it back around to sarcasm, which is just cynicism in a more thoughtful form. Paddington 2 is like its main character. It doesn’t know how else to view the world but genuinely.
No one said Pirates movies were cinematically healthy, but up till now there have been defenders of each film at least regarding tastiness. Dead Men Tell No Tales is like Davy Jones in previous films: chained to the job he was hired to do despite having no heart.
10 Cloverfield Lane films with cinematography that doesn’t pander to what an audience expects, but pressures it to believe everything it says. Where normal budget horror jolts the viewer with harsh twangs and a false scare that you know is coming, 10 Cloverfield Lane never falsifies anything.
The Thing’s lack of a stable form worked for Carpenter, who was able to squeeze a pure and palpable uncertainty out of never knowing who or what the Thing exactly was. But in Heijningen’s version, it seems to be more a matter of horror tradition than the transcription of a bold idea.