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Film Clips
Reviews by Ian Caruth, James DiGiovanna and Linsay Hernon
ALONG CAME A SPIDER. Adapted from a James Patterson novel from the same series as Kiss the Girls, this film finds Morgan Freeman reprising his role as detective Alex Cross. A botched sting operation killing his partner sends Cross into a tailspin, but when a senator's 12-year-old daughter is kidnapped the remorseful dick is put back on the job. Michael Wincott plays a criminal psychopath who poses as a teacher of pubescent computer hackers at a well-to-do private school when his actual objective is to commit the crime of the century, surpassing even the Lindbergh baby tragedy. Despite a moderate rise of intensity and Freeman's screen-stealing performance, the unpolished plot creates a tangled web of unconvincing twists with expedient conclusions and enough loose ends to leave even a spider hanging. --Hernon
AMORES PERROS. This Mexican nominee for Best Foreign Language Film lost to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but it's a much smarter, more original film, and it's every bit as entertaining as the kung fu flick that defeated it. Weaving together three stories of difficult love, Amores Perros pays homage to Tarantino's Pulp Fiction without being just another derivative imitation. Plus it features convincing acting, engaging plotting and lots of pretty, fluffy dogs. Just like all the great movies used to do. --DiGiovanna
BLOW. Blow had one of the best trailers I'd seen in years: stylish, fast paced, featuring Johnny Depp's beautiful face and arresting imagery of piles of money and cocaine. Well, in brief, you might want to wait for Blow to come out on video, and then just rent the trailer. It's your basic life-of-crime-doesn't-pay story, with Depp starring as real-life coke dealer George Jung. OK, so maybe crime doesn't always pay, but sometimes it pays, and when it does, it pays big, man! Look at Stalin or Clinton or Bush! These guys had it made! I just wish someone would make a movie about a drug deal gone right, after which the dealers walk off into the sunset richer and happier than all their loser friends who went into accounting or veterinary medicine. You know, so the kids will understand what life's all about. --DiGiovanna
BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY. In adapting Helen Fielding's hugely popular novel to the big screen, rookie director Sharon Maguire doesn't break any new ground. Mostly disposing with the diary format of the book and focusing more on Bridget's two-man troubles than her interactions with friends or any other self-improvement measures, BJ'sD looks on the surface like just about any other romantic comedy, albeit one refreshingly free of felonious stalking behavior. So why does it work so much better than most other movies of the genre? Crack screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, the BBC's sublime Blackadder) has a lot to do with the film's success; his sharp dialogue keeps things percolating, even through several unlikely plot twists. But here it is the leads who carry the movie: Renee Zellweger plays the plucky Bridget with commendable sensitivity, seeming hopeful and rather touchingly insecure but never shrill, while Hugh Grant is typically memorable playing a slightly more caddish variation on the Dashing Fop character he's perfected. Funny, charming and ever so delightfully British, BJ'sD succeeds in every respect that the similarly themed Someone Like You failed. Keep a lookout for the most inexplicable cameo ever from a fatwah recipient. --Caruth
CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES. This unnecessary third installment of the Australian bushman meets the big bad city routine stars Paul Hogan as the familiar crocodile hunter. He travels to Los Angeles with his mini Mick Dundee and his wife when she is asked to fill in at Daddy's big wig newspaper company. Though the city is different this time, the trials with technology are still the same as the naïve Aussie gets a lesson on the revolutionary drive-thru invention, the wonders of a coffee enema and a country bar of drag queens. This run of the mill mockery of opposite lifestyles eventually leads Mick to the middle of a lame fine art smuggling operation at a film studio which he single-handedly must stop in a funhouse-like finale. This stale sequel offers no fresh thoughts or situations, and the only laugh is from a meditation teacher, but this ironic surprise cameo hardly makes this film worthwhile. --Hernon
CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON. Variety magazine used to refer to martial arts movies as "chop socky flicks." Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon would, then, be a really big chop socky flick. It's got all the cheesy, goofball stuff you'd expect from the Taiwanese kung-fu movies of the '70s, but with an enormous budget to back it up. Chow Yun Fat stars as a master of the Wudan school of martial arts. The big bonus to being a Wudan master is that you can fly, which is the kind of thing that looks great on a big screen, especially if the characters are flying over misty Chinese landscapes while fighting with ancient, magical swords. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is big-time fun, but don't go expecting to see Citizen Kane. This is more like a Saturday-morning cartoon raised to the level of Wagnerian opera, with all the amusement and stupidity that are found so abundantly in both of those art forms. --DiGiovanna
DRIVEN. Speed and sexual confusion are the orders of the day in this actioner set in the fast-paced world of CART racing. Thrusting through space in his sleek long vehicle, beautiful young racer Kip Pardue can't decide whether he's pursuing his buff Italian teammate, a dominating, severe German competitor, or the German's nubile ex-girlfriend. Scripted by costar Sylvester Stallone and directed in Renny Harlin's usual style, alternately--and sometimes simultaneously--shrill and bland, not even the lusciously bitchy Gina Gershon can elevate matters, as she's relegated to a background role. Driven's only mediocre as an action movie, but the subtext is hilarious; stay tuned for the money shot at the end, where Pardue is glazed with spurting white foam from two of his manly competitors' enormous champagne bottles. --Caruth
ENEMY AT THE GATES. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud depicts the realities of war through bullets, bombs and blood in the muddy trenches of Stalingrad as the Russians battle Nazi Germany in 1942. In the midst of the guns and the gore is the acclaimed Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev, played perfectly by Jude Law, who instills hope in his country by using his cunning ways to capture his nemesis, Major Konig of the Third Reich (Ed Harris). The two run through the rubble in the dismal, cold winter for an intense game of predator versus prey, in an epic saga that rings true victory. --Hernon
EXIT WOUNDS. It's the same old testosterone-filled story: dirty cops, naked beauties, drug smugglers and a hot-shot cop all tangled up in high-speed chases, rapid gunfire and flagrant fights. Steven Seagal stars as a delinquent Secret Service agent who, after getting demoted, is sentenced to rage-aholic group therapy and traffic duty, where he soon finds himself in the middle of a covert drug heist. A car-crazy drug lord (DMX) leads the muscle-bound thugs and crooked cops through inane plot twists (which somehow manage to include the always-annoying Tom Arnold as a moronic talk show host) culminating in the inevitable showdown. The weekend polls calculated this recycled dribble as being number one at the box office, but what they did not calculate were the audiences rushing toward the exit, wounds or not. --Hernon
THE FORSAKEN. This movie begins with a shot of a young woman washing blood off of her well-formed breasts. Yes, we've struck cinema gold! From there it's more blood and nudity and really cute boys as Sean (played by Dawson's Creek cute-boy Kerr Smith ) and Nick (played by Brendan Fehr, who could turn Patrick Buchanan gay -- well, you know, gayer) travel the desert Southwest in search of the vampires who have cursed them with eternal youth and beauty. My goth-geek friend Amy Sarah said that she didn't like this film because "it added nothing to the vampire genre." Excuse me, but the opening sequence is a woman washing blood off her naked breasts! I guess some people just don't understand art.--DiGiovanna
FREDDY GOT FINGERED. I took my poor friend Amata to see this film, and the uncomprehending look of horror that sat upon her face while Tom Green committed one cinematic atrocity after another will haunt me until my dying day. Amata, who had worked as a henchwoman for some truly sadistic Venezuelan drug lords before brutally dismembering them and taking over the business, was not used to the kind of cruelty that American comedies can inflict upon an audience. This "film," if it can be called that, is really just a series of vignettes featuring as much blood and inhumanity as possible. If you want to see Tom Green swing a new born baby over his head by the umbilical cord, then, by all means, go see Freddy Got Fingered, but do so with ample warning that this will be the most unpleasant possible way to spend ninety minutes without actually meeting Richard Simmons. --DiGiovanna
JOE DIRT. Since the dawning of man's realization of his own mortality, art has struggled to create something eternal and universal, bridging the gaps of time, solitude and death to reach the empyrean and touch the face of God, thereby to find the familiarity of one's own face. Perhaps the apex of human artistic endeavor, Joe Dirt depicts the human struggle unflinchingly, showing us alone, poised on the cusp of the Grand Canyon of the soul, keening for our kind. Who among us has not been Joe Dirt? Standing proud, mullet-feathered and majestic, covered in feces from the septic tanks strapped to his back, the parentless Joe Dirt is an existential Everyman. Knowing not from whence he came, nor to where he is going, his search for identity is complicated, like ours, by unthinkable choices and unanswerable questions. Should we have relations with our sister? Should we get our 426 Hemi out of hock? Should we search for our parents, and, if so, will they sell ceramic clowns? These questions and more are answered in the haunting, unforgettable Joe Dirt. Also features Kid Rock. --Caruth
MEMENTO. A very sly film that begins at the end and moves backwards to the middle, never quite reaching the beginning. The visually stunning Guy Pearce stars as a man who has no capacity to form new memories, so he tattoos information on his body, leaves himself notes, and attempts, through a set of cryptic communiqués to himself, to get revenge on the man who murdered his wife. There are layers of irony in this well-constructed noir, not the least of which is that it requires a great deal of memory on the audience's part to piece the story together. Although ultimately it's more puzzle than movie, it's still riveting and has that rare feature of assuming that its audience is more intelligent than the average rhesus monkey. Well, more intelligent than the average rhesus monkey that hasn't taken the super-monkey serum. --DiGiovanna
ONE NIGHT AT McCOOL'S. It all happened one night at McCool's when a titillating department store perfume pusher with kleptomaniac crusades and dream home delusions casts her seductive spell onto three gullible guys. Liv Tyler plays the conniving vixen behind an innocent Mary Kay façade who sets a trap of murder, theft and sex on a susceptible bartender so she can turn his Boo Radley shack into the ultimate Xanadu, complete with DVD. Before long an overzealous Christian cop, a bingo addict with a phony pompadour, an evil twin on a shooting spree, and a married lawyer with a Woody Allen stutter and kinky sex fetishes fall prey to the psychotic seductress. This dark comedy is a refreshing delight of colorful characters, sharp wit, and proper timing compiled by an all-star cast, an Oscar winning producer and fresh talent behind both camera and pen. --Hernon
SPY KIDS. Guns-and-gore writer/director Robert Rodriguez switches gears with this Crayola-colored conglomeration of James Bond and Pee Wee Herman. Fegan Floop, a demonic Willy Wonka of children's television, sips fluorescent green goop soup, creates new cartoon characters with silly putty, and organizes to take over the world with his dreaded thumb-thumb robots and an army of super-powered spy kids. Yet have no fear, because to the rescue come a couple of charismatic children of international secret agents, who have become POWs of the maniacal villain. Though the special effects and acting are of a kindergarten quality, the imaginative display of futuristic gizmos and the crime-fighting kids are sure to boost any child's interest and confidence. --Hernon
THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. Seemingly harmless lies lead to war in this intricate plot adapted from John LeCarre's 1996 novel of blackmail, political backlash and espionage. Geoffrey Rush plays an ex-con and gifted tailor. When a vulgar British Intelligence agent (Pierce Brosnan) is exiled to Panama to ensure that the Panama Canal returns to American possession, the needle and thread man concocts a tall tale of an Anti-Noriega Resistance. However, the naïve informant quickly gets in over his head as he compromises the safety of his close friends, ignites the beginnings of an international war and betrays his wife, a Panamanian government agent. Although the Central American country is portrayed as a cesspool of corruption, poverty and prostitution, and Brosnan is anything but his usual classy Bondian self, the complex plot is sewn together with seamless ingenuity. --Hernon
TOWN AND COUNTRY. Wedding vows are thrown out the window in this disappointing dialogue-driven would-be comedy, led by the wasted talent of an all-star cast. Warren Beatty stars as a flashy NYC architect with an addiction for adultery as his mistresses multiply from a book smart Marilyn Monroe look alike, to a simple-minded cellist, a deranged daughter of a dysfunctional family, and a childhood friend. All of these tiresome affairs quickly fall flat in the hackneyed script with an attempted savior of cluttered wannabe humor of a gay getaway, a half-naked gourmet chef, a bitter crone on wheels and a pyromaniac sharpshooter. This movie delayed its release date for three years for countless rewrites and re-edits, and should have held out for another year to go back to the drawing board. --Hernon
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