I knew if I lived long enough I would eventually see a film so unremittingly stupid that it becomes almost an event. Monster, unwritten and undirected by Patty Jenkins, who should muster the mercy never to make another movie so long as she lives, deals with a Michigan-born highway prostitute who, stranded in Florida, becomes […]
Daily Archives: June 13, 2007
Sanitizing Eric Knight’s novel, whose title and content predictably misread Polonius as Shakespeare, Anatole Litvak’s This Above All balances wartime romance and wartime propaganda. It’s the most charming, entertaining Hollywood film about the British homefront during the Second World War. Prudence, although an aristocrat, enlists in the ranks of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force); […]
Written by Eric Guggenheim and directed by Gavin O’Connor, Miracle is a mess of a movie, a cliché-ridden Disney sports melodrama revolving around the unexpected victory of the U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics. It narrows this topic to Coach Herb Brooks’s relentless preparation of his hand-picked team of dedicated amateurs, but it […]
Hana-bi comes from Japan. Takeshi Kitano wrote, directed and edited this allegedly important piece of cinema; as Beat Takeshi, he is also its star. He plays a cop who retires after a young rookie is (he feels) killed in his place when he (the retired cop) takes off a few hours to visit his wife […]
Steiner is Walter Steiner. A measily two minutes is devoted to his wood carving, while the balance of the film, some three-quarters of an hour, is devoted to his “ecstasy,” ski-jumping—or, as Europeans apparently call it, ski-flying. Needless to say, we get lots of shots of Steiner in slow motion “being ecstatic,” with Werner Herzog […]
Dennis Grunes 