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Latest Reviews:
The X Files: I Want To Believe
I genuinely do: I want to believe. I want
to believe in aliens and psychics and fluke men. More than that,
though, I desperately want to believe that if the Man is being
a scary, lying sonofabitch, there's a couple of methodical, deadpan
FBI agents out there with flashlights and cell phones and a drab
mid-size sedan, patrolling the highways and biways of middle America
/ Vancouver with a dogged (Doggett?) interest in figuring out
just what the hell is going on. Maybe not solving, maybe not saving,
but at least seeing. I believe in The X Files.
(July 26, 2008)
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight - which arrives at a level
of craft and dedication that will be a high-water mark for 2008
- is not just the film that Batman Begins inspired in
all of our minds with its critical final words ("escalation,"
"taste of the theatrical," "calling card").
It is significantly more: the most dextrous, complicated, and
absorbing "comic book movie" ever made.
(July 20, 2008)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
For all his prodigous gifts with the look
n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps
in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance
in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial
relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all
the clocks? Pan's seemed to herald the completion of
a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure
stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy.
With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses
as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends.
The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor
storytelling.
(July 13, 2008)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
I know what I'm in for when I step into an
Indiana Jones movie, and it ain't common sense, or even
layman archaeology. To paraphrase Dr. Jones, the danger is folklore:
brilliant for its MacGuffiny, quest-inducing power, but a little
thin on credibility. Still, believable or not, the Ark had rules.
(Indy even spelled them out, in a brisk 2-minute scene, relying
occasionally on a blackboard to help him do so.) The creators
of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
have apparently observed no rules whatsoever.
(May 22, 2008)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber
of Fleet Street
One of the things I like least about my job
is the ocasional seeming need to psycho-deconstruct filmmakers
who, in the paraphrased words of Sick Boy, "had it, then
lost it, then it was gone forever." Doing this head job is
(of course) pointless, because really, how the fuck do I know
what went wrong with Tim Burton? I don't know anything about him.
He might look at his recent work with the same mortified contempt
that I hold for it, and spend his lunch hours crying uncontrollably
in an increasingly small series of bathrooms.
(December 23 2007)
The Golden Compass
The only time the daemons truly impress, ironically,
is when they die - each of them vanishes in a dangerously aestheticized
explosion of fiery Dust particles, which positively reeks of a
studio saying "we could do something really cool here!"
rather than thinking that, perhaps, a human life being snuffed
out ought to be played as horrific rather than wondrous. But I'm
sure some spreadsheet somewhere proved that golden baths of dusty
colour sell more happy meals than souls being pinched out of existence
by the brutal finality of death.
(December 7 2007)
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