American Pie 2 is, for all intents and purposes, a collection of gags that might have ended up on the cutting room floor of American Pie. Yes, the characters are all a year older, they’ve put a year of college behind them, and they’ve all had sex. But they’ve remained so exactly the same that…
Directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, “American Gangster”, featuring the dynamic duo of powerhouse lead actors Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, is a blistering biopic that creates a celebratory filth in allusion to crime, capitalism and the corruptible spirit of the crooked consciousness. The ruthless storytelling method behind this gritty crime actioner is quite appealing…
What do chipmunks and Styrofoam snowball have in common? They are both harmless, cute and very light. Don’t believe what I just said until you watch “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. It’s nothing more than a mix of tedious live action and uninspiring computer animation based upon the so-called originality music-and-cartoons franchise that Ross Bagdasarian started…
Along Came Polly is a flat, formulaic romantic comedy, sporadically punctuated with entertaining moments – and one hysterical salsa-dancing set-piece. Having co-written Meet the Parents and Zoolander, director John Hamburg knows how to play to the strengths of his star, and he’s penned another bizarrely named character – a risk assessor with Irritable Bowel Syndrome…
Associated Press (April 05, 2001) Consider Little Miss Muffet. She’s sitting on her tuffet, minding her own business, eating her curds and whey. Spider comes along, sits down beside her, scares her away. Miss Muffet was lucky – she had plot, motive, and character development. The same cannot be said for Along Came a Spider,…
Writer-director Cameron Crowe’s reputation has evolved into an odd hybrid of bankable studio hitmaker and semi-reluctant zeitgeist guru. Creating movies at a semi-Kubrick rate of once every five years or so, Crowe is often credited with being selective about the stories he tells, which more often than not tend to strike a chord with the…
I should have been more suspicious. If my colleague Greg gave 1 star to Aliens vs Predator first volume – then perhaps I should lash out and leave this one bare. I guess everybody agrees that Paul Andersons’ Aliens vs Predator was not good. Including the guys in charge of the new opus (Visual effects…
Technically, I guess you could say that I’ve been waiting for this movie since 1990, when the unmistakable shape of an Alien skull could be seen displayed as a trophy inside the Predator spaceship in Predator 2. Suddenly, the stage was set for a series of comics, playing cards, video games, internet chat room wars…
Michael Mann’s film about legendary heavyweight boxing champ Muhammad Ali equals the grace, wit and charisma of its main character. More subtly constructed and understated then Mann’s previous work, the film has an energy and integrity that leave the director’s ostensibly shocking, actually ho-hum thriller The Insider in the dust. The formidable Ali’s exhilarating portrait…
Begun as a series of anime-inspired shorts that aired on MTV in 1991 (and a subsequent regular series and graphic novel), Aeon Flux was a violent, sexual, kinetically charged series that pushed all kinds of boundaries and gained quite a large cult following. Unfortunately, the film adaptation is a busy, schizophrenic film that suffers from…
